AllMovie

While strategy, careful planning and understanding your opponent are clearly important parts of any successful military campaign, none of them mean much if the basic support for the men in the field has been ignored, and hungry soldiers are not going to help anyone win a decisive battle. Military chefs are traditionally unsung heroes whose contributions are rarely recognized by history, but filmmaker Pere Kerekes allows a handful of veteran army cooks from around the world a chance to share their stories as well as their recipes in the documentary Cooking History. Chef Peter Silbernagel was the only survivor when the German submarine the Hai sank in 1963, and he talks about his experiences and prepares a meal as the tide rolls in at the seaside. A German cook shows off the meat blintzes that he served to nearly eleven million men in uniform during World War II. A Jewish cook who was drafted into baking in a concentration camp after he was captured by Nazis found a way to keep up the fight by serving German officers bread laced with poison. A Hungarian cook talks about the bloody realities of making sausage with whatever was available in the midst of an attempted revolutionary uprising. And a Yugoslavian cook who became Josip Broz Tito's official food taster reveals how the conflicting tastes of the leader's staff mirrored the trajectory of the war in the Balkans. Ako sa varia dejiny (aka Cooking History) was an official selection at the 2009 Hot Docs International Film Festival, where it received an award as "Best International Feature."