Dainty dishes to set before a dictator
by Witold Szabłowski Penguin 288pp £14.99 The Week Bookshop £11.99
“No man is a hero to his valet and no man is a complete monster to his cook,” said Jennifer Reese in The Washington Post. That’s the “chief takeaway” from this fascinating book by Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski, which consists of interviews with the former chefs of five notorious despots: Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Fidel Castro and Enver Hoxha. Some of Szabłowski’s subjects are gushing: Yong Moeun, who cooked for Pol Pot, describes the tyrant responsible for the deaths of two million Cambodians as “a beautiful man... like a clown”. Castro is similarly eulogised: “I love El Comandante as if he were my father,” his chef declares. Other subjects are “more clear-eyed”, though still reluctant to criticise. Hoxha’s chef, “Mr K”, recalls using his cooking to soften the Albanian strongman’s ferocious temper. “Quite often he’d sit down at the table feeling agitated and get up in a good mood, joking even. Who knows how many people’s lives I saved that way?”
I had rather hoped to learn that autocrats are fond of dishes that “civilised people would shun”, said Rose Prince in The
Spectator. “But sadly there are no gruesome tales of dear leaders pincering out the brains of live monkeys or dining on chargrilled dog.” Instead, we learn that Saddam liked kebabs and lentil soup; that
Pol Pot favoured a “sharp, raw papaya salad”; that Amin was fond of steak-and-kidney pie. More interesting than the “curiously banal” culinary choices are the “capriciousness and bullying” on display, said Wendell Steavenson in the FT. Saddam, who made a great display of barbecuing for his friends, would pour Tabasco over the meat he’d cooked, “to see if anyone would complain”. Unsurprisingly, no one did.
The “wiliest operator” in this book is Amin’s chef, Odera Otende, said James Marriott in The Times. Having worked for Amin’s predecessor, Milton Obote, “his position looked uncertain when tanks swept into the palace grounds and his old boss was deposed in a military coup”. Otende swiftly “whipped up a goat pilau” – and Uganda’s new president kept him on. Otende, who owed his position to his skill at cooking mzungu (white people) food, is the “most politically interesting” of Szabłowski’s chefs. The others mostly say little that is truly revealing about their former bosses. Ultimately, one gets the sense that “dictator’s stomachs offer few clues to their souls. But that doesn’t stop this epically well-researched book being a lot of fun to read.”