This book almost makes me regret signing up for Netgally. What a slog. I did get this book from Netgally in exchange for an honest review.
Feasting on leg of lamb, Bonnie Prince Charlie doomed the Jacobite Army at Culloden. A uniquely American menu served with French wine lubricated the conversation between rivals Jefferson and Hamilton that led to the founding of the US financial system and the location of the nation’s capital in Washington. After schweinwürst and sauerkraut with Adolf Hitler at his Berghof residence, Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg agreed to the complete integration of Austria into the Third Reich. Celebrity chef Tony Singh has researched the menus and recipes for all ten dinners down to the last detail and recreates them here. The book contains fifty-five recipes from soup to desert and lists the spirits as well.
I love history and I love food, so this should have been right up my alley. It was not. The book isn’t badly written, but there is an air of smugness about it that set me teeth on edge. Struan Stevenson’s writing bounces between quoting from historical record to offering observations as if he was present at these meals. At times he seemed overly enthusiastic about the matching livery of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves, or patronizingly smug about oil company leaders “smacking their lips” while enjoying a fine single malt. By inserting observations that he could not have made himself as if he had observed them, he gives the impression that he wanted very much to be in the room where it happened.
Stevenson declares himself intrigued by dining diplomacy, but then doesn’t really articulate why the meals he has chosen fit his thesis – how did they change the course of history? The first meal – Bonnie Prince Charlie’s meal the night before the Battle of Culloden is a great example. I know that the Jacobite leadership feasted well and lavishly while the English were more restrained in their pre-battle dinner, but Stevenson makes no connection between the what happened at those dinners and the butchery that happened on the battlefield the next day. I would also argue that the dinner Hitler had with Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg was irrelevant. The Anschluss was going to happen and the dinner did nothing to alter Hitler’s plans for Austria. If there is a case to be made that the dinner held some history changing significance, Stevenson did not articulate it.
The dinner that Stevenson was clearly most interested in was Winston Churchill’s birthday dinner with Stalin and Roosevelt in Tehran. A couple of weeks after finishing the book, it is the only section of the book that has stuck with me. Even in this section though, Stevenson could have done a lot more to talk about how soft diplomacy improved the relationship between the three and how that impacted the end of World War Two.
There are recipes at the end of each chapter, but they left me feeling flat.
This book is very male, very Western and leaves me feeling like Stevenson longs for the days when white men made major decisions together behind closed doors.
