Alright, that’s far enough off topic. Unless you have a good recipe for horse.
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Great article!
I especially love this quote from food historian, Lois Ellen Frank, re: the culinary landscape of the Old World pre-1492:
If we deconstruct that these foods were inherently native, then that means that the Italians didn’t have the tomato, the Irish didn’t have the potato, half the British National Dish—Fish and Chips—didn’t exist. The Russians didn’t have the potato, nor did they have vodka from the potato. There were no chiles in any Asian cuisine anywhere in the world, nor were there any chiles in any East Indian cuisine dishes, including curries. And the French had no confection using either vanilla or chocolate. So the Old World was a completely different place.
I knew about tomatoes and, theoretically, potatoes, but the bit about no chilis in any Asian cuisine or in curry???
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Great quest.
Yes I had horse,
Did not taste like chicken. More like very lean cow.
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Goth Ottolenghi, this time the Ultimate Traybake Ragu, a Bolognese-inspired vegan sauce. Served with squid ink pasta.
With fresh mushrooms, dried porcini, miso, soy and tomato this was an umami bomb. We made the entire recipe and now have pasta sauce for four meals - it makes a lot.
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Be careful what you ask for
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I was once served horse meat in a restaurant, but was told it was steak. It had the consistency of reinforced cardboard. Not good at all.
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You made me laugh so hard I squirted horse milk out my nose!
BtW, how come they do not milk pigs?
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Yes, we grilled it.
It was like shoe leather.
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I have no desire for horse meat for two reasons:
- Horses are raised for their athleticism. So lack a lot of delicious fat
- I read a lot of historical fiction. I associate horse meat with what soldiers of the past ate in desperation.
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Most horse meat on the market in many countries comes from older, working animals that have hit the end.
So it apparently tends to be particularly tough, and not terribly pleasant.
There’s some that comes from culling wild horses. But in the US at least we apparently send most of that to prisons and homeless shelters.
It kinda has a reputation as a poverty food for a reason. The very few times I’ve had it, I don’t really remember much about it. Not really a stand out sort of thing.
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Is the choice of meat a culturally sensitive thing?
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I’ve only had it raw as basashi in Japan. The first time the thin slices of raw horse came out on a mound of sliced raw white onion and it was hard to taste anything over the onion. The second time was in an izakaya in Shinjuku where The Teen requested it specifically (his brother had upsold it after the first time).
It was really good - it reminded me of beef carpaccio only “beefier” which I put down not to the meat so much but the lack of condiments that you generally get on carpaccio. We ordered seconds, and like carpaccio it goes really well with beer.
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‘… it real goes really well with beer’
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Yep. A working animal that had died on its own. Yuck.
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Because it would be sower milk?
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oh that’s terrible!
brilliant, but… ugh!
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I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the piglets need every drop to thrive. Dairy cows were bred to produce excess milk long before we had artificial means of prolonging production past the time calves were dependent on it.
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