Alastair Little, Richard Whittington

Horse Meat

Appears in
The Daily Mail Modern British Cookbook
The Daily Mail Modern British Cookbook

By Alastair Little and Richard Whittington

Published 1998

  • About

It has never been thought odd to eat horse meat in Belgium and France, where chevaline butchers still ply their trade, while in Italy there is a highly prized and expensive salami made from donkey. André Simon wrote in A Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy that older horses and work animals were too tough to be enjoyable, but that the fillet of a three-year-old thoroughbred was a costly luxury, only available when a horse broke its neck at exercise.

A British aversion to the idea of eating horse meat is, in any case, comparatively recent. Plenty of people ate it here in the ‘40s and early ‘50s when rationing made us reconsider what was acceptable fare. In 1947 alone, 19,000 horses were slaughtered in Britain for human consumption. London at that time certainly had at least one restaurant, Rose’s, which served nothing else.