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fatimaelf's review
challenging
dark
informative
medium-paced
4.0
What a fascinating idea, the question of who feeds a country’s tyrannical leaders, and how those cooks saw the dictators they served. For the most part the book was fascinating too, but not entirely because of the question asked — more because of the people the question was asked of, and how their responses were similar or different.
Take Idi Amin and Enver Hoxha’s cooks: they were constantly worried that by their leader’s whim they would be executed. Though Hoxha’s chef wasn’t directly impacted by Hoxha’s brutality, Amin’s chef was, though he worked for him (and his predecessor, Odote) throughout Amin’s brutality against others. The chefs of Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot thought positively of their leaders. Only one, Pol Pot’s chef Yong Moeun, refused in any way to criticize her dictator (despite the absolute unfettered evil he enacted), though it’s clear that’s because she was in love with him and also, well, part of a cult. Castro’s chef Erasmo was wary of critiquing him as well, loyal to the end (he mostly blamed the starvation on the United States’s embargo), but he could still offer up a flaw of Castro’s. Odote and Hoxha were frugal dictators; Hussein and Amin were lavishly generous. Hoxha, Amin, and Hussein were aggressively paranoid, which obviously affected the work of their cooks. Most of their chefs worked for the dictators through famine, which didn’t affect them personally or their employers.
It was clear that the stories told were just that of people. That they happened to serve the leaders of their countries were almost incidental, except that it typically insulated them from the worst of the regime’s brutality. Odote and Amin’s chef even stated it himself: What was he meant to do, as a cook? He couldn’t poison them. He could just do his job. Which really begs the question — what did we expect from the chefs at all? If the bodyguards, maids, chauffeurs, or tailors didn’t step up to kill these men, why should we expect the cook to do so, or even want to? What the book makes clear is that in all countries, dictatorships or not, everyday people just want to survive.
This book was a good reminder of that. None of the cooks really offer much in the way of juicy gossip or state secrets — they spent most of their time in the kitchen, after all. They do offer good glimpses into what it takes to run the leader of a country’s household, which can be fascinating on a human level. But as far as really examining the dictators themselves, there’s not much to offer. And that’s not a bad thing! In fact each cook was intensely fascinating, just for how they ended up preparing food and eventually working for the respective leader, and how each felt about it.
I just wish Szabłowski had — and forgive the pun — added more meat to the bone. I wasn’t quite taken with his own personal stories about traveling the country, and many of his sections felt like they belonged in a newspaper article about a post-dictator society. I really don’t understand why he included the part where he asked Otonde Odeta, Amin’s chef, to make him a meal exactly as he would have Amin, when we don’t get Szabłowski’s reaction to the meal itself. It felt superfluous. I’m also not totally sure why he included Flores’s ramblings in Castro’s chapter, and I’m not sure what exactly it added to the story of the cooks — not that it wasn’t sort of interesting, trying to decode the man. But he wasn’t right in the head, so it felt too voyeuristic to read his sections. Some interviews with the people about how they viewed the dictator’s regime was interesting, though I wish he’d spent more time getting into the actual dictators themselves, or the history of the country, or anything at all really. The more personal stories, such as a man’s search for his father’s grave, weren’t bad to read about, they just felt out of place.
I’m not totally sure I agree with how he organized the book either. It’s split up into five main chapters — breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper, and dessert — with smaller “snack” chapters in between each new one, all of which are from the perspective of Moeun. Initially I didn’t understand why it was organized this way at all, until I read about the United States’s military operation (“Operation Menu”) which mostly consisted of dropping tens of thousands tons of bombs on Cambodia. So I get why he did it. But I don’t think it was the best organization for the book. I think each “snack” chapter should have been about the cook we were about to read about, or had just left, not referring to a cook we wouldn’t get to until they end (and who, honestly, was half ambassador, half cook). And I’m not sure why he ordered them the way he did — it isn’t as if “Supper,” for example, was exclusively about supper foods.
Finally, and I understand the limits that Szabłowski faced — the chefs were older, or unwilling to talk, or afraid — but I wish we had gotten more information from each cook. The recollections felt more like splices, glimpses of a life, rather than a cohesive unit organized into a story to tell. Abu Ali’s chapter in particular, regarding Saddam Hussein, felt particularly lacking. Szabłowski mentioned in the prologue that he could write a whole book devoted to how he got these cooks to trust him enough to tell him their story. And while I don’t think a whole book is necessary, I think this book could have been improved greatly by including those efforts. Because now I wonder — why did they talk to him? These people who lived their life in fear (mostly), why would they talk to a Polish journalist? How could they trust him to tell their story? I think that would have added richness to the story, and given more weight when the stories were actually told. Perhaps instead of listing sections of the cooks’ words verbatim, he could have organized them more like a history, or a story, peppered in with trying to convince them to talk and the history of the country he was visiting at the time. It’s not a huge deal, it’s just I think the style could have been vastly improved.
These are all nitpicky, though. Truly it was a fascinating glimpse into the lives of cooks who served some of humanity’s worst — and how they came out on the other side.
the_moody_marshmallow's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
4.0