Strange Foods. Jerry Hopkins

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СКАЧАТЬ with one-hundred and fifty-six for lean beef.

      To satisfy the market that now includes Japan, thousands of wild horses, donkeys, and mules are killed and butchered in the western United States each year. Oddly, it is an expensive government program that has created, or at least abetted, this industry. The program, managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, is intended to protect wild horses on public lands, where they compete for water and forage with grazing cattle. What this means is that “excess horses” are rounded up and offered to the public for adoption. The government spends more than US$1,000 to collect, vaccinate, brand, and administer the paperwork for each horse and adopters pay US$125 for a healthy horse, as little as $25 for one that is old or lame. The new “parent” agrees to keep the animals for at least one year. Some do, many don’t, most selling them for slaughter eventually, usually receiving $700 apiece. More than 165,000 animals have been rounded up since the program was started in 1982, costing the government over $250 million. A tenth of that sum is considered a good year in the sale of the meat by export to Europe and Japan.

      Sources

      In Europe and Japan, many butcher shops or meat departments in markets offer horse meat matter-of-factly. In other Euro-American regions, it is still stocked in some pet shops, but it is wise to have someone along who can recognize the cuts and freshness.

      Zebra may be purchased on the hoof from rancher Audren Garrett, Rt. 7, Box 388c, Springfield, MO 65802, phone (417) 866-5113 or from Doug Smith, Bear Creek Ranch, phone (210) 367-2320, email <[email protected]>. You’d better have a butcher standing by, along with a very large freezer or plans for a sizeable barbecue.

      From The Plains to the Plate

      BIG HORN, WYOMING—Last year, 85,000 horses met their end in the four horsemeat packing plants left in America. In 1996, these businesses shipped $64 million worth of horsemeat to Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Mexico. The prime candidate for slaughter, say buyers, is a 10-12-year-old well-muscled quarter horse. The hind quarters are chilled and flown to Europe; the front quarters are cooked and minced and sent by boat.

      This is an all-but-invisible trade. Even the United States Department of Agriculture, the government agency responsible for inspecting horsemeat, is stingy with information. Studies and analysis of the industry are practically non-existent. Packing plants are about as open as a frozen oyster. The Central-Nebraska Packing Company of North Platte politely but firmly rejected this reporter’s request to visit it. “With people burning down plants, we don’t make a habit of giving tours,” said the manager. He was referring to an incident in July 1997, when arsonists did $1 million of damage to the Cavel West packing house in Redmond, Oregon, which specialized in horsemeat. A torch-happy group, the Animal Liberation Front, claimed responsibility.

      The Economist, May 23, 1998

      Of the fourteen retail horsemeat butchers still open in Paris, this establishment in the fashionable rue St. Antoine, owned by Jean-Pierre Houssin, has the most traditional façade, including glass paintings and three of the distinctive gilded heads above the shop.

      A mobile horsemeat butcher’s shop does brisk business in a French Provincial town, selling freshly slaughtered steaks and mince.

      So it is not a big business, but it is a medium-sized one that likely will not go away. Some conservationists say it is a billion-dollar industry, a figure that makes people at U.S. slaughterhouses laugh and say, “I wish.”

      “Killed on Friday, processed on Monday, Thursday we load the truck and then it’s flown to Europe,” says Pascal Derde, proprietor of the Cavel West, a packing house in Redmond, Oregon. “Tuesday eaten.”

      However popular that horse may be today, it is unlikely there ever will be an event to top one held during the mid-nineteenth century, not long after Napoleon’s pharmacist, Cadet de Gassicourt, and others publicly testified that horse meat had sustained a number of lives during the general’s military campaigns. Larousse Gastronomique, the famed cookery encyclopedia, reported that on February 6, 1856, a number of butchers and chefs organized a banquet at one of Paris’s grand hotels, offering horse-broth vermicelli, horse sausage, boiled horse, horse stew, fillet of horse with mushrooms, potatoes sautéed in horse fat, salad in horse oil, and a rum pastry with horse marrow. Guests at the feast included the novelists Alexandre Dumas, who not only wrote The Three Musketeers, but also the 1,152-page Grand Dictionaire de Cuisine, and Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary.

      Horse may be substituted for beef in many recipes—the animals are related, after all—and it is particularly suited for raw dishes, the lean flank sliced thinly and presented with a hot sauce (horseradish is not inappropriate) or as “horse tartare,” mixed with chopped onions and herbs and spices and served with Worcestershire sauce. In Japan, umasashi, horsemeat sashimi, is widely prized; in the south of France, the local sausage is based on ground horse meat, and is grilled, baked, or fried.

      Other members of the horse family also are eaten, notably the zebra in Africa, where their extraordinary number have made them an inexpensive and readily available protein source for centuries. Laurens van der Post, a South African writer whose book First Catch Your Eland (1977) recalled his gastronomic adventures as a child and maturing adult, said zebra fillets and steaks provided “the tenderest and tastiest meat of all.”

      Today, zebra meat finds its way to open markets scattered across eastern and southern Africa, where the herds are most numerous. It is also, more or less, a staple in specialty restaurants and is usually spit-roasted, delivered for carving at the table.

      Saucisson d’ane—donkey meat dried sausage—is one of the specialties of the town of Arles in the south of France, seen on sale at the Saturday market and served with olive bread and a glass of Côte du Rhone.

      rat Et mouse

      The first time I heard about the rodent as a comestible was when I was told about a restaurant in London where a French couple reportedly served a savory rat stew. The way the story went, the couple immigrated to England following the Second World War, bringing with them a recipe developed during the German occupation of Paris, a time of severe shortages. Meat was particularly scarce and of necessity, the couple caught rats in traps in the alleys and cooked them with whatever vegetables and herbs they could find, creating a distinctive and delicious dish. “Unfortunately,” my friend told me, “the rats were as stringy and tough as the Parisians, so it was pretty chewy. Not to worry about that today, my lovely. The day of the alley rat is done. Today, they raise their own rats, feed them grain until they’re plump and juicy.”

      My friend said the dish was listed on the menu in French for “rat stew,” and next to it were the words “when available.” That permitted the waiter to make sure it was understood just what kind of meat the customer was ordering. The only surprise the owners wanted to offer their patrons was how good it tasted. They did not want to hear anyone cry, “I ate WHAT!?!”

      Sadly, the elderly owners of the restaurant had died and the establishment had closed, so it was many years before I actually got to eat a rodent. It finally happened the first time I stayed with my friend Samniang Changsena’s parents, who are rice farmers in northeastern Thailand. There, field mice are not only savored as a gastronomical treat, but also are considered a superb way of disposing of agricultural СКАЧАТЬ