NONFICTION
‘What’s Cooking in the Kremlin’? A Heady Mix of Propaganda and Paranoia.
The new book by Witold Szablowski features the chefs who were expected to prepare sumptuous meals for Russian leaders — and keep them from being poisoned.
WHAT’S COOKING IN THE KREMLIN: From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire With a Knife and Fork, by Witold Szablowski. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
Witold Szablowski describes a number of surprising dishes in his entertaining yet unnerving new book, “What’s Cooking in the Kremlin,” which explores the last century of Russian history through its food. But none is as surreal as the recipe for one of Lenin’s favorites. The instructions for making his “scrambled eggs using three eggs” orders you to break the eggs but not to beat them. What Lenin called “scrambled eggs” were actually fried eggs, with their yolks and whites intact — not scrambled at all.
Szablowski’s previous books include “How to Feed a Dictator” and “Dancing Bears”; as a Polish journalist born in 1980, he doesn’t have much nostalgia for the Soviet Union, though he has spent considerable time talking to people who do. The chapter about Lenin is mostly narrated by a Moscow tour guide who speaks wistfully of what might have happened if Lenin’s “dreams had come true.” (This “tour guide” turns out to be a composite of three people — a fact that is annoyingly slipped into the bibliography.) Szablowski eventually intervenes with his own skeptical interpretation of events, but much of the book, translated into chatty English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is given over to oral history for a reason. I began to think of Lenin’s scrambled eggs as a metaphor. The stories that people insist on telling show how propaganda works.
- 作者: 維特多.沙博爾夫斯基
- 原文作者: Witold Szabłowski
- 譯者: 葉祉君
- 出版社:衛城出版
- 出版日期:2023/02/01
- 語言:繁體中文
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許菁芳/那些知曉一切的廚師──讀《克里姆林宮的餐桌》
文/許菁芳,|,衛城出版2023年02月22日
英諺有云,「抓住一個人的胃,就能抓住一個人的心。」食物確實是承載了文化,涵養人的精氣神,飲食飽醉之間鋪陳通往人心的道路。 從這個角度說來,該俗諺精巧地捕捉到了兩種掌握人心的技藝:一則為權力,二則為飲食——事實上,這兩者相輔相成,政治家與廚師彼此心知肚明,他們都是致力於 more
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