When Idi Amin threatened to shoot the cook

Private chefs keep many secrets and are expected to go to their graves without sharing a morsel of gossip about their employers. Whether cooking for a pop star, tycoon or member of a royal family, chefs must guarantee confidentiality. Chatter can be career-ending or lead to lawsuits. For a few such cooks, revelations could even end in execution.

When the Polish journalist Witold Szablowski came up with the winning idea of writing a book about what some of the world’s most notorious dictators ate, it proved a difficult task. Finding just a few living examples of their chefs took more than two years; persuading these individuals to tell their secrets even longer. Many years after their former bosses had died or been deposed, they were still afraid of their past. One chef featured here — who cooked for the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha — still insists on an assumed name, Mr K, even though Hoxha died in 1985.

But Szablowski’s dogged pursuit across continents was rewarded. He found Otonde Odera, a Kenyan from the same tribe as Barack Obama, who was Idi Amin’s trusted head chef. In Cambodia he met Pol Pot’s cook of many years, Yong Moeun, and was perplexed to find himself laughing with the woman who had catered for her master in the jungle amid genocide. Two Cuban chefs, known only as Erasmo and Flores, bring Fidel Castro’s dining table to life, and Abu Ali, the private chef of the paranoid Saddam Hussein, tells of food-tasters, and describes the despot’s favourite ‘thieves’ fish soup.

Szablowski allows them to tell their stories in their own words and takes each account as he finds it. You can believe what you want, but the details they provide add to the authenticity.