The Book of Perilous Dishes
First published in Romanian in 2017 and set in Bucharest under Turkish rule at the end of the 18th century, The Book of Perilous Dishes weaves an atmosphere of magic, some real and some perhaps, but not necessarily, imagined by its fourteen-year-old heroine, Pâtca, child of a mystical order called the Satorines. When her grandmother is arrested for witchcraft, Pâtca flees to Bucharest to take refuge with her uncle Zăval only to find him murdered along with his household servants. What follows is an elaborate dance through a time of political turbulence, when the ruling prince might be replaced by the Ottoman Sultan for the price of four bags of coin, and no one can be trusted.
Pâtca is an enterprising child, but she is also fourteen and, as she later confesses, prone to do exactly the wrong thing in a crisis. She becomes embroiled in a feud between her new guardian and the current prince over the services of a Gypsy cook with magical abilities. The cook is in possession of a copy of the dangerous Book of Perilous Dishes, whose recipes have the power to wreak havoc. Pâtca’s efforts to find her uncle’s killer and secure her inheritance take her on a wild tour of the prince’s kitchens, the local prisons, and the house of a mysterious “spiritist” named Perticari. The character of Pâtca is wonderfully delineated, and throughout Pâtca’s first-person narrative, we too are fourteen, smart, frightened, beginning to fall in love with unsuitable men, and furious a good deal of the time. I loved her.
