At the end of the day, a man’s gotta eat, even if he is a heartless dictator whose hunger for power came at the expense of the lives of countless innocent people. But what is it that some of the worst of humanity like a half-portion of between Holocausts?
On today’s Moncrieff, Seán chats to the Melissa Scott, the co-author of a new anthology book Dictators’ Dinners, dishing up the truth on the eating habits of these homicidal egomaniacs.
Tune in live at 3.45pm: http://www.newstalk.com/player/
Here are five of history’s dictators’ favourite dishes:
1. Benito Mussolini
Il Duce’s preferred dish was a plate of roughly chopped garlic, left raw but dressed with olive oil and lemon juice. His wife, Rachele, used to abandon their bedroom at night to seek refuge from his breath.
Dictators’ Dinners also claims that Mussolini was prone to migraines whenever he ate mashed potatoes, and that the only meat he could stomach was veal.
2. Adolf Hitler
While you may have heard that the German dictator was a vegetarian, it is now believed he liked to chew on gamey birds like pigeon, particularly when it was stuffed with tongue, liver and pistachios.
One of the soldiers in Hitler’s Berlin bunker in the final days of his life noted that the Fuhrer’s feeding habits were rather bizarre, from the mechanical way he used his knife and fork to his biting his nails at the dinner table.
3. Kim Jong-Il
While famine in North Korea is believed to have wiped out millions, Kim Jong-Il is described as perhaps the biggest foodie of them all; sending his personal chefs all over the world the retrieve exotic ingredients like mugwort-flavoured rice cakes and Iranian caviar, he’d spend millions to fill his plated with the most haute of cuisine.
His favourite was a tie between shark-fin soup and poshitang, a Korean delicacy said to provide immunity and vigour, and which is a soup made out of dog meat.
4. Muammar Gaddafi
The Libyan dictator was partial to a tall glass of camel milk, which is renowned for mangling your digestive system and bringing about a seriously unpleasant case of flatulence. As a side order, Gaddafi liked boiled camel hump with couscous.
5. Joseph Stalin
The current Russian president Vladimir Putin is the grandson of Stalin’s personal chef Spiridon, whose cooking limits were pushed to the extreme with routine feasts expected to last six hours.
Dictators’ Dinners says the communist premier was heavily influenced by his Georgian routes, and was particularly partial to satsivi, a dipping sauce made of walnuts and garlic.
