What do dictators like to eat?
You
are what you eat - but also how you eat and who you eat with. Food can
affect your mood, your bowels and your world-view, write Victoria Clark
and Melissa Scott, authors of Dictators' Dinners: A Bad Taste Guide to
Entertaining Tyrants.
In this age of the foodie, the gourmand and the gourmet, we
have taken a fresh look at some of the worst dictators of the 20th
Century by subjecting them to culinary scrutiny. Without seeking to
mitigate their crimes by humanising them we wanted to cut them down to
human size. The line between man and monster can be very thin. Although forced to conclude that evil-doing and delusions of grandeur cannot be attributed to the consumption of any single food or any one physical constitution, hints of patterns did emerge.
As many dictators aged they grew more and more obsessed with the purity of what they ate. North Korea's Kim Il-sung had all his rice grains individually selected and created an institute whose sole purpose was to devise ways of prolonging his life.
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The Today programme's Sarah Montague and former
British Ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer try the favourite foods of
Benito Mussolini and Saddam Hussein.
The vast majority of our dictators came of humble, peasant stock which meant that their favourite foods tended to be anything but Cordon Bleu.
For all his lavish hospitality to royalty and stars of stage and screen, Tito loved nothing so much as a slice of warm pig fat, while Ceausescu - when at home - had a weakness for a stew made with a whole chicken… feet, beak and all.
Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena pictured in 1981 in Bucharest
Some of our most infamous subjects - Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong and Benito Mussolini - found the stress of the gigantic responsibilities they had taken upon themselves took a heavy toll on their digestive systems.
John Simpson on Gaddafi
In one interview I did with him, he threw up his head and laughed at each of my questions. In another, he broke wind very audibly throughout the 40-minute recording session, without making the slightest effort to hide it.
Hitler's chronic flatulence may
have accounted for his becoming a vegetarian and to his allowing a quack
doctor named Theodore Morrell to dose him with as many 28 different
medicines, including one made of extract of Bulgarian peasants' faeces.
On the other hand, famously flatulent Muammar Gaddafi seems
to have been untroubled by his affliction. Midway through World War Two,
a failing Mussolini was examined by a Nazi doctor who pronounced him
dangerously constipated.Mao Zedong, a passionate carnivore, was a lifelong martyr to his bowel movements: "I eat a lot and I excrete a lot," he happily reported in a letter to a comrade in his early days. Much later, on a visit to the USSR to meet Stalin, he would find to his fury that he could not excrete at all - the squatting type of toilet he was used to was unavailable in Moscow.
Stalin enjoyed picnics at his dacha
Lasting five or six hours, from 11pm until 5am for example, they became a refined form of torture thanks to obligatory participation in drinking games, sing-alongs and dancing.
Over-drinking, paralysing fear and cruel teasing once turned a diner like Nikita Khrushchev into a staggering incontinent wreck. Comrade Tito of Yugoslavia could only keep up with the toasting by vomiting into his jacket sleeve.
Tito's favourite - pig fat
Evangelically vegetarian, Hitler apparently engaged his eating table companions in chit-chat about goings-on in a Ukrainian abattoir, a topic so revolting that his carnivorous guests were unable to finish their food.
It is hard to imagine Jean Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, Idi Amin of Uganda, or Francisco Nguema of Equatorial Guinea - all of them strongly suspected of indulging in cannibalism - turning a hair at such talk.
We of course do not provide a recipe for the human corpse stuffed with rice and flambeed in gin, cited by Bokassa's former cook, who was somehow unable to recall the sex of the corpse he claimed Bokassa commanded him to prepare.
Saddam Hussein whose son, Uday, killed a food taster in 1988
Saddam Hussein's delinquent son Uday was beaten up and hurled into jail for the crime of killing one of his father's tasters. Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu never travelled without a high-ranking Securitate officer, who was also a chemist, equipped with a mobile food-testing laboratory.
Ultimately, of course, all the food-tasters, chemists, faddiness and fussiness in the world could not save these men. They all died in the end - and many died violently.
Ingredients
- 1.5kg chicken
- 700g walnuts
- 5 medium onions
- 4 cloves of garlic
- 2 tbsp white wine vinegar
- 1 tsp dried coriander
- 1 tsp blue fenugreek
- I heaped tsp of dried marigold, available at good health food shops
- ½ tsp of cinnamon
- 5 crushed cloves
- Salt
Cut the roasted chicken into serving portion-size pieces.
Finely chop the onions and fry in more of the surface oil from the boiled chicken for 6 to 7 minutes. Transfer them to a mixing bowl and smooth to a paste with a hand blender. Add the onion paste to the rest of the boiled chicken water.
Grind the walnuts finely and mix with the coriander, fenugreek, marigold, cinnamon and cloves
Crush the red pepper, garlic and salt in a pestle and mortar, before adding this mix and the vinegar to the walnut mix.
Gradually add the rest of the boiled chicken water to the mixture until it has a smooth consistency.
Hold the sieve over the pot used for boiling the chicken and pour the mixture through, discarding any large particles left in the sieve.
Add the chicken pieces to the mix and bring it to boil, before removing from the heat.
Allow to cool before serving.
bbc.
