April 20, 2013

Finest Hour 153, Winter 2011-12

Page 46

Dinner Diplomacy

Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table, by Cita Stelzer. Short Books, hardbound, 304 pp., illus., £20, Amazon UK £9.40, also available through dealers via Amazon USA.

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By Barbara F. Langworth


In 1958, at the urging of Clementine Churchill, Georgina Landemare, the Churchills’ faithful cook, published her book, Recipes from No. 10. Finest Hour gets many queries about Churchill’s taste in food, drink, and cigars, so one afternoon I sat down with Lady Soames and Mrs. Landemare’s book and tagged the favorite family dishes. This resulted in a column in FH 95, which lasted for four years, until a reader survey indicated it was the least popular department.

Cita Stelzer has taken a new approach with Churchill’s “dinner diplomacy,” finding “aspects of his character and personality—humanity, humor, curiosity, zest and resilience—that were revealed at the dinner table.” She writes not only about what was served at his table, but what was served to him.

Churchillians are a well-read audience, and will recognize much of the material in this book. What Cita Stelzer has uniquely accomplished is to extract from the salmagundi on Churchill the many references related to foods.

Our advance review copy did not contain the bibliography, which must be intriguing. She has dug deep to find the intimate details of many a meal, cloaking it with the historic venue and illustrating her pages with photos, menus and memorabilia of the events.

One favorite of mine was WSC’s birthday cakes. I’ve read that they were imaginative and exquisitely wrought; she had found several pictures and descriptions which I particularly enjoyed.

The book is arranged chronologically. The nine chapters in Section One include meals during the 1940s at Newfoundland, Washington, Moscow, Adana (Turkey), Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. Here we meet Stalin, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Truman, Lord Moran, the Churchill family and close friends and relatives around the dinner table, on picnics or in dining cars.

Section Two answers the kinds of questions people constantly ask: what did Churchill like to eat, drink and smoke? The final chapter is on wartime rationing—a constant challenge for Churchill. In order to maintain support for the programme, Stelzer relates, he had to abide by the rules. This chapter demonstrates Churchill’s personal effort to help ease the lot of British citizens during the war. For example what he named “British Restaurants” (instead of the suggested “Communal Feeding Centres”) was a plan of subsidized dining to allow the poor to “have a meal without giving up coupons.”

Churchill’s methods had been learned years before, Stelzer relates. Late in World War I, when he was Minister of Munitions, Churchill had to deal with a serious strike. “He agreed to meet one of the strikers….’Let’s have a cup of tea and a bit of cake together,’ he said….the issue was resolved to the mutual satisfaction of both parties.”

Just before leaving Potsdam for England to hear the election results that hurled him from office in 1945, Churchill hosted a notable banquet for Allied leaders. Menu cards reproduced in the book start with cold clear soup or hot turtle soup (one of his favorites), fried sole, roast chicken, boiled new potatoes, peas, cold ham (WSC’s ham had always to be accompanied by mustard), lettuce salad, fruit salad, ice cream (another favorite) and Scotch Woodcock (a dish of scrambled eggs and anchovies).

The wine list sparkled with Amontillado, Hallgartener Riesling ’37, Krug ’37, St. Julien ’40, Stokes Port, Trunier Brandy, Cointreau and Benedictine. There was a program of music, and a carefully planned seating plan. Nothing was left to chance.

From a “cuppa” to an elaborate dinner for twenty-eight at Potsdam, Churchill used dining as a cunning means to his ends. This agreeable and interesting book, on a topic that fascinates many, is Ms. Stelzer’s first: a real service to the literature.

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