Book Report: Hitler Was A Vegetarian (Except When He Ate Stuffed Pigeon)
Stalin liked to fling food at his guests. Mussolini’s favorite raw garlic salad caused his wife to sleep in the other room. Saddam Hussein worried about his figure. Idi Amin found human flesh “too salty”. These are the things you can learn from Dictator’s Dinners: A Bad Taste Guide to Entertaining Tyrants, which is part history book, part cookbook, and 100% fascinating.
Guiding the reader by continent, the authors give a brief description of each dictator and their food philosophies. Hitler, for example, would break his vegetarianism for stuffed squaw, and Kim Jong-Il proclaimed to have invented “double bread with meat” in the year 2000. Sounds a lot like a sandwich to us. Muammar Gaddafi liked to bring his camels with him when traveling to provide him with “the odd glass of milk”.
A quick read, Dictators’ Dinners contains fun facts like these as well as recipes that range from the exotic, to the repulsive, to the sort of appealing (if you’re going to admit that you like the same food as a dictator). Here is a sampling. We’ll let you decide which is which. Even if you don’t make any of them, we’re sure they’ll come in handy at the next dinner party you attend where you’re seated next to that handsome history buff. That happens, right?
