Cooking History: War, in the Kitchen

Cooking History: War, in the Kitchen

By Joel McConvey • May 15, 2009 • 1 Comment

As civil war ravages Sri Lanka and militants approach the capital of Pakistan, do you ever stop to wonder: in the throes of war, who’s making the chapatis?

If it seems as though I’m making light of serious situations, the film Cooking History asks you to consider the gravity of the question. The documentary by Slovak director Peter Kerekes, which picked up a special jury prize at the Hot Docs documentary film festival in Toronto last week, looks at major European conflicts of the 20th century from the perspective of some often-ignored but crucial figures in warfare: military chefs.

It’s a pretty specific subject, but makes for a fascinating study of how food plays a key part in all human relations, even hostilities. The interview subjects have tales to tell from many different theatres and perspectives; we hear from Germans who fought and baked in Russia during WWII, a Hungarian butcher who made sausage for leaders of the occupying Russian army, French cooks who served in Algeria, and Serbs and Croats who were forced to cook enemy cuisines during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

The best story comes from Branko Trbovic, who cooked and tested food for Josip Broz “Tito,” former leader of what used to be Yugoslavia. Trbovic tells of how different cultures’ foods were used aggressively to promote nationalist agendas at meetings ostensibly convened to discuss Yugoslavian unity: Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman served Dalmatian ham with olives and Croatian pot roast, while Slobodan Milosevic offered up a counter-meal of sour curds, Zlatibor cheese and Serbian polenta. In these cases, food was standing in for flags, suggesting the deep significance people attach to their national cuisines, even when the foods don’t appear markedly different to outside observers (to me, schnitzel is schnitzel).

The film is kept lively by a pesky narrator (presumably Kerekes) who asks questions like, “Aren’t recipes the same as [military] orders?” and “How did you feel, cooking for people who blew up your goulash in 1956?” The dark undertones of the subject are hinted at by scenes of the slaughter and violence necessary for food (i.e. meat) – most memorably in a scene in which a man describes atrocities committed in Algeria, juxtaposed with images of a chef preparing a chicken carcass for Coq Au Vin. To some degree, we are always fighting with food.

The dominant theme, though, is spelled out by a Serbian women preparing a huge, steaming pot of pork paprikash stew: “With no food there is no war.” What people eat affects their behaviour, and that applies especially to soldiers under the stress of combat. As such, the film implies, these cooks have played key roles in shaping the conflicts they were ostensibly on the fringes of, by providing sustenance to those who actually did the shooting – and to those who ordered it. Indeed, the most tragicomic moment comes again from Trbovic, who tells sadly how, after Tito died, the food at government headquarters went to pot. “It wasn’t about high standards anymore,” he says, lamenting how the leaders that replaced Tito were fond of fatty “peasant food,” not the refined dishes the late Yugoslavian leader had demanded.

The film ultimately works as a humanizing effort because it asks us to stop and think about how the mundane is a central part of war, even though propaganda, rhetoric and sensationalism would try to suggest otherwise. It’s not often that you think of the so-called enemy sitting down to a humble meal – and yet, as one interviewee in the film says, “Life goes on, and the soldier has to eat, whether he’s Russian, Hungarian, French…” Add Iraqi, Afghani, Sri Lankan, Tamil, Israeli, Palestinian, North Korean or Sudanese to that list, then picture him (or her) contentedly mawing down a gob of lentils or a wad of kimchi, and it helps to erode the picture of the foreign soldier as a monster whose only appetite is for enemy blood.

You can find more on the film at www.cookinghistory.net. In the meantime, here’s my favourite recipe from the film, apparently fed to Russian soldiers in Chechnya:

Shashlik (for a company of Russian soldiers)
1 small cow, 10 litres of red wine, 10 litres grape juice, 12 kg tomatoes, 0.7 kg paprika, pinch of salt.

In Canada we might call that “Beef Sangria,” and it sounds to me like a sure-fire summertime hit.

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http://pagg-stack.org Adam

Shashlik is a kind of skewer in eastern europe. Did you mean goulash?

Cooking History: War, in the Kitchen

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