The Book of Perilous Dishes

The Book of Perilous Dishes / Doina Rusti
trans. from the Romanian by James Christian Brown
Oxford, UK: Neem Tree Press, 2022, c2017.
272 p.

 

This is a fantasy, a book about witches and magical cookbooks and demons and history. It's inventive, curious, and perfect for this time of year. If you like the magical cooking of Like Water for Chocolate, or the melding of history and food in John Saturnall's Feast, this might be one for you!

We follow the main character Patça through the story - she's a young woman from a family of occult specialists. It's 1798, and she's heading to Bucharest in search of her Uncle Zaval, to retrieve her Book of Perilous Dishes. But she arrives to find him murdered and the book missing. She has to make her own way in this wild west of a city where she can get arrested in a moment, and use what she's found at her uncle's house to search out the fate of the book, and her family. 

She has some help with this when she's taken in by the rich woman in town, whose chef, Silica, has been poached from her kitchen by the local ruler. This will be important later! Patça tracks down clues with the help of her uncle's vague map she's found, as well as the presence of the spirit that her family serves. She discovers who is cooking from the Book of Perilous Dishes once chaos begins to descend on the city, and must try to stop or reverse the effects. 

This book is based in history, and that part of it is interesting -- it's an area that shifted wildly between rulers, countries and empires, and the story shows the shifting allegiances and quick changes experienced by the residents. The occult side was interesting but I felt a bit weak; the guiding spirit doesn't really do much, and it's unclear what the relationship is -- does Patça's family serve him, or does he serve them? Is he even really real? 

I found that there were a lot of characters to follow, and quite a fragmented narrative, split between 1798 and Patça's later recollections in 1829, thirty years after the events. Sometimes it's not clear which Patça is talking. I liked it but didn't fall in love with the worldbuilding or the characters. It's eerie in parts, with a creative premise and a flavouring of Romanian history, which made it worth reading, for me, even if I didn't feel that the story was entirely successful plotwise.