Spicy culinary "travelogue" How to feed a dictator
A spicy culinary "travelogue" that contains passages like Faulkner, but also episodes that are comic or so full of intrigue and betrayal that it could be called With Machiavelli in the Kitchen. An appealing book that will give you chills.
Human life is linked to food. Everybody has to eat, whether it is a common man, a king or a president. Or a dictator. Even revolutions cannot be made on an empty stomach. Witold Szabłowski wondered how the worst dictators of the 20th century ate when they oppressed and massacred the people of their own countries.
What did Saddam Hussein have for breakfast when he ordered the gassing of tens of thousands of Kurds?
What did Pol Pot eat at a time when nearly two million Khmer were starving to death?
What did Fidel Castro have for dinner when the world was on the brink of nuclear war because of Soviet missiles in Cuba?
Was Idi Amin really a cannibal?
What did Enver Hoxha's cook have to watch out for to avoid ending up in jail?
What can the people who took care of their daily diet say about history?
Witold Szabłowski travelled across four continents to find the personal chefs of dictators, often the first to hear accounts of their lives and cooking careers. Did they influence the course of history with their culinary art? Their life stories answer many questions, while drawing intimate portraits of dictators in their home environment and illuminating their personalities from a hitherto unusual angle, from the dining room table. Take a peek with them under the lid of the pot in which world history was cooked in a unique book that is also a bit of a cookbook.
