They Eat Horses, Don't They?

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  MENU OF THE CAFÉ VOISIN: 25 DECEMBER 1870, 99TH DAY OF THE SIEGE (skip)

  Hors-D’Oeuvre:

  Butter, Radish, Stuffed Donkey’s Head, Sardines

  Soups:

  Red Bean Soup with Croûtons

  Elephant Consommé

  Entrées:

  Roasted Camel à l’Anglaise with Fried Goujons

  Jugged Kangaroo

  Roasted Side of Bear with Pepper Sauce

  Main Courses:

  Roasted Leg of Wolf with Venison Sauce

  Cat surrounded by Rats

  Watercress Salad

  Antelope Terrine with Truffles

  Bordeaux Mushrooms

  Buttered Peas

  Dessert:

  Rice Pudding with Jam

  Cheese:

  Gruyère

  Now that the ancient taboo had finally been broken, hippophagy in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries went from strength to strength, with the consumption of horsemeat increasing by 77 per cent between 1895 and 1904.8 In 1876 butchers in Paris marketed the flesh of over 9,000 horses, mules and donkeys, a total weight of more than 3.7 million pounds.9 Prized for its high iron and nitrate content but relatively low in fat, horsemeat was regularly prescribed by doctors for all sorts of ailments from anaemia to tuberculosis. Owners of cavalry and shire horses were only too delighted to offload their old nags at the knackers’ yards.

  The first half of the twentieth century saw the apogee of horsemeat consumption: by 1913, native French horsemeat dealers were unable to keep up with demand and horsemeat had to be imported from abroad. Horsemeat butchers, or boucheries chevalines – with their distinctive horse’s head above their doorways – burgeoned, particularly in working-class areas, such as the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris or the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. Cheaper than other meat and shunned by hippophile aristocrats, horsemeat was always working-class fare: even at the peak of its consumption, it was associated with low status and poverty.10

  From the 1950s onwards, though, the role of the horse changed. No longer a beast of burden or war (those roles having been taken over by the tractor and the tank respectively), the horse came to be regarded as a pet by the increasingly pony-mad French. Nevertheless, the average French consumer did not seem too fazed at the prospect of eating his new friend, as the horsemeat industry in France continued to thrive around the middle of the century (110,290 tonnes équivalent-carcasse or TEC, the industrial unit of measurement of horsemeat, were consumed in 1964).11 But in the 1980s, something disastrous happened to the horseflesh trade: the Devil recreated the former 1960s sex symbol and fashion model Brigitte Bardot as a vegetarian animal rights activist. She vociferously denounced the act of eating an animal that had become man’s loyal companion, and condemned the – admittedly ghastly – conditions in which horses were transported to slaughter. It is probably at least partly down to Bardot’s influence that consumption of horsemeat in France fell dramatically in the 1990s.

  Contrary to popular belief, then, the French are becoming increasingly hippophile and less and less hippophage. In 2004, for example, France consumed 25,380 tonnes of horsemeat (mainly imported from abroad) – less than half the amount consumed in Italy (65,950 tonnes). The Italian market remains the main export market for French horsemeat, valued at 90 million euros per year.12 According to figures from the French livestock rearers’ association OFIVAL (L’Office national interprofessionnel des viandes, de l'élevage et de l’aviculture), hippophagy dropped by 60 per cent between 1980 and 2001. And relative to other types of meat, the French don’t consume much horsemeat at all – just 0.4 kg per French person per year in 2005, compared to 22.5 kg of beef.13 The French, in fact – today as in the past – tend to eat horsemeat most when pushed by fear of something worse: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, for example. (Rates of horsemeat consumption shot up during the mad cow disease crisis of the mid-1990s, which led to a ten-year ban on export of British beef to the rest of the European Union.) Even now, the average Frenchman would prefer to eat a horse than British beef. Many French people actually think that BSE stands for ‘British Spongiform Encephalopathy’. Nothing, in fact, terrifies the nation of the Laughing Cow more than the spectre of la vache folle.

  Meanwhile, the battle in France between hippophiles and hippophages continues unabated. An attempt in 2010 to ban the consumption of horsemeat by law failed, although the animal protection leagues did manage to get it taken off the shelves of many French supermarkets by organized campaigns of letter-writing. And the boucherie chevaline – previously a common sight on the French high street – appears to have had its day, with only a few dozen of them now remaining in the whole of Paris. There are horse retirement homes where old Dobbin can put his hooves up in luxury after a hard life of service, and there is even a legal provision for horse owners to stipulate on a sale that their horse is not to be sent to the knacker’s yard (two-thirds of French light horses and ponies are now protected in this way).14

  AN EXCEEDINGLY NOVEL USE FOR AN OLD NAG (skip)

  ‘At Paris, where all eccentricities are found and even encouraged, one of the latest gastronomic innovations is the use of horse-flesh.

  This social phenomenon of making the horse contribute to the nourishment of the human race is not altogether new. The ancient Germans and Scandinavians had a marked liking for horse-flesh. The nomad tribes of Northern Asia make horse-flesh their favourite food.

  With the high ruling prices of butcher’s meat, what think you, gentlemen and housekeepers, of horse-flesh as a substitute for beef and mutton?

  Banquets of horse-flesh are at present the rage in Paris, Toulouse and Berlin. The veterinary schools there pronounce horse-bone soup preferable beyond measure to the old-fashioned beef-bone liquid, and much more economical.’

  From The Curiosities of Food; or the Dainties and Delicacies of Different Nations obtained from the Animal Kingdom

  Peter Lund Simmonds (London, 1859)

  The French Horse Butchers’ Association, of course, has taken up arms in opposition, marshalling arguments in support of the continued consumption of horsemeat. The most convincing of these is: ‘mind your own business’. The least convincing is that the nine breeds of horse reared in France for meat would die out if people stopping eating them.*

  * One cannot, somehow, be convinced of an argument that says that the continued survival of a species depends upon its being eaten.

  Hippophagy is supported by the French racing profession and stud farms, and even the renowned horse trainer and impresario Clément Marty, known to his adoring fans as ‘Bartabas’, is on record as urging, ‘Si vous aimez les chevaux, mangez-en!’ (‘If you love horses, eat them!’). An acrimonious debate on the horsemeat question is currently raging in France between tweedy traditionalists on one side, and urban reformers on the other. In some ways, this clash has parallels with the foxhunting debate of the early 2000s in Britain – the main difference being that, apart from a few diehard activists, the French public is nothing like as exercised by the rights and wrongs of eating horses as the British public was by the morality of hunting foxes with hounds.

  The relatively laissez-faire attitude of most of the French public on the horsemeat issue was illustrated by the French reaction to the ‘Horsegate’ scandal of 2013. The crisis blew up when ‘100 per cent beef’ products – including burgers, lasagnes and chilli con carne produced by Findus, Picard and other frozen-food manufacturers – were found to consist of anything up to ‘100 per cent horse’. Investigations across the European Union revealed a tangled network of abattoirs, subcontractors, traders, meat processors and frozen-food distributors. In France, a Languedoc-based meat-processing company was accused by the French government of selling horsemeat labelled as beef. The French government and consumers were enraged, like everybody else, over the issue of traceability: a government inquiry was immediately set up and calls made to the EU for the labelling of presumptive ‘beef’ by country of origin.

&
nbsp; The French response to British expressions of outrage at the idea of consuming horsemeat, however, was a giant Gallic shrug of the shoulders at the incomprehensible sentimentality of the British towards animals. As the food critic of the newspaper Le Monde, Jean-Claude Ribaut, observed: ‘It’s an English ethnocentric attitude that applies also to rabbit, andouillette, frogs and calves’ heads.’ He added that, unlike the French, who legally define a horse as a farm animal, ‘the English consider the horse a domestic animal. That’s their right,’ noting for good measure that horsemeat is low in fat and ideal for steak tartare.15 Le Monde even dug up an expert on the history and culture of food to explain to its readers the weird British antipathy to eating horseflesh: according to the distinguished academic, this aversion is due to Britain’s inception of the Industrial Revolution, which meant that horses lost their status as working animals and became pets at an earlier date than in other parts of Continental Europe.16

  The reaction of French consumers interviewed in supermarkets by the national television news was not so much disgust and outrage at eating horse, as disgust and outrage at not knowing what they were eating. Perhaps the French have a point. After all, if one can tuck into octopus and pufferfish sashimi without batting an eyelid (these are now standard fare in the average hip London restaurant), should sliced raw horsemeat with grated garlic, miso paste and soy sauce really pose much of a problem? (In fact, the ‘Horsegate’ scandal revealed that a number of Asian restaurants in Britain had been discreetly but openly serving horsemeat successfully for years.) As a number of commentators on both sides of the Channel have pointed out, the true issue of ‘Horsegate’ is not so much the rights and wrongs of eating horses, as the fast-disappearing traceability of what we eat in a vast multinational production line.

  Never may the French be accused of failing to turn a situation to their advantage, however. The solution to the crisis, according to their national media, is simple: vive le boeuf français!

  Myth Evaluation: Partly true. The French are divided between hippophiles and hippophages, but in any event they eat a lot less horse than the Italians.

  … AND FROGS’ LEGS… AND SNAILS

  If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.

  MARK TWAIN, AMERICAN WRITER (1835–1910)

  There is no doubt that frogs and snails are indelibly associated in the English folk imagination with the French, mainly because they are said to eat them. The names we give to our Gallic neighbours reflect this long-held metaphorical association: Frogs, Froggies, Johnny Crapaud… But whether the Froggies do indeed consume the vast quantity of amphibian body parts that we tend to assume, perhaps deserves a deeper inquiry.

  Il pleut, il mouille, c’est la fête à la grenouille, Il pleut, il fait pas beau, c’est la fête à l’escargot.

  It’s raining, there’s a fog, it’s the party of the frog, It’s raining, there’s a gale, it’s the party of the snail.

  FRENCH CHILDREN’S RHYME

  As far as frogs are concerned, the association between the French and jumping amphibians goes back into the mists of time. It probably originated with the heraldic device of the ancient kings of France, which was ‘three toads erect, saltant’ (Guillim’s Display of Heraldrie, 1611). Ironically, the first recorded references to the French as ‘frogs’ seem to have come from the French themselves: as early as the sixteenth century the great French apothecary and seer Nostradamus referred to the French as crapauds, or toads, declaring in a typically elliptical statement, that les anciens crapauds prenderont Sara. (As ‘Sara’ is the word ‘Aras’ reversed, when the French under Louis XIV took Arras from the Spaniards, this verse was quoted as prophecy.) The term ‘frogs’ was widely used of the Parisians when much of Paris was a quagmire or marais – Qu’en disent les grenouilles? (‘What will the frogs say about it?’) was in the 1700s a common phrase at the royal court in Versailles.17 In England, however, ‘frog’ was originally used to denote the inhabitants of the marshy Fens of East Anglia and swampy flatlands of Holland; ‘Nic Frog’ was once a nickname for a Dutchman. The transference of the amphibious appellation to the French took place in the mid-seventeenth century, fuelled at the turn of the eighteenth century by the Napoleonic Wars.18 The image was reinforced in subsequent years by the known penchant of the French for frogs’ legs as a culinary delicacy. In his Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1873), Alexandre Dumas remarks that the English, who had a horror of frogs’ legs, had for some ‘sixty years’ been drawing caricatures of French people consuming them.

  As for the term Rosbifs or ‘roast beefs’, used by the French to refer to the English, this originated from the supposed dish of preference of His (or Her) Majesty’s subjects.*

  * Now out of date for, as we all know, today’s ubiquitous English national dish is curry.

  The English were historically associated with the colour red, presumably from the uniforms worn by Wellington’s ‘redcoats’ at Waterloo.19 For the same reason they were also referred to at this time as homards, or lobsters.20 Some uncharitable French commentators have also explained the terms Rosbif and homard as allusions to the colour of your average Englishman after exposure to the sun. French appellations of an unkind nature relating to the typical complexion of the average Englishman are legion, and include the fetching term têtes d’endives, or ‘chicory heads’ (chicory is cultivated in the dark to preserve the whiteness of the leaves).

  Are the French the voracious eaters of cold-blooded amphibians that we think they are? It seems that they are not. In reality, the French don’t eat nearly as many frogs’ legs as one might expect. The biggest European importer of frogs’ legs is not France but little Belgium, which imported a weighty 24,696 tons in the period from 1999 to 2009. Frogland itself trailed with a mere 10,453 tons. Nor do the Americans appear to be as frog-shy as one might expect: in the last decade, 21,491 tons of frogs’ legs were imported into the USA.21 Frogs’ legs, in fact, are considered a delicacy in many parts of the world. In the Far East they are found in soups, or caramelized in sticky piles with sesame seeds. In the southern states of the USA they form an integral part of Cajun cuisine, either coated in breadcrumbs or skewered on a barbecue. There are many in Texas who fondly remember frog giggin’ (i.e. frog hunting) in their younger days, and grilled frogs’ legs with cornbread and purple hull peas is still considered a classic summer dish in the Lone Star State. In France, on the other hand, frogs’ legs are increasingly seen as a somewhat eccentric dish with the retro appeal of traditional cuisine at its most earthy, rooted in the regions or le terroir. If you see them at all, they will generally be drowned in butter, garlic and parsley. They are – allegedly – delicious, and as Hannibal Lecter said of the French themselves, supposedly taste like chicken. But a word to the wise: before attempting to cook them, you should be aware that fresh frogs’ legs apparently deal with rigor mortis in a very different way from chicken. It’s no coincidence that Italian scientist Luigi Galvani used dead frogs for his pioneering investigations of bioelectricity in the 1780s: the legs will likely twitch in the pan when placed in direct contact with the heat. Rest assured, though, they really are dead.

  CURES FOR A FROG IN THE THROAT (skip)

  For centuries, snails and frogs have been considered to have medicinal properties, providing cures for everything from chills to eczema and even a surfeit of sexual desire. Gypsies have long used various frog parts to cure fevers. Snail stock was widely used in nineteenth-century France as a cure for flu, and is referred to by Balzac in his novel The Country Doctor (1833). Snail stock was so popular than Antonin Carême even provided a recipe for it in his classic treatise on French cookery, L’Art de la cuisine française au XIXè siècle, published in 1832: take twelve snails and four dozen frogs’ legs, poach in water with leeks and turnips, strain the stock, colour with saffron, and drink morning and evening. Even today, cough syrup containing extract of frog can be purchas
ed from pharmacies in France, and those suffering from a surfeit of sexual desire can try toad poison in the form of the homeopathic remedy Rana Bufo 5CH.

  Which brings us to the sticky subject of snails. Unlike frogs’ legs, snails are eaten in vast quantities in France, the French being the largest world consumers of gastropods, at close to a billion snails eaten every year.22 The snail is a part of French folklore, the subject of endless stories, legends and comptines (children’s songs). Every French region has its own name for the humble creature: cagouilles in Saintonge, carago in Provence, carnar in Lorraine, schnacka in Alsace, lumas in Poitou, caracol in Flanders, carcalauda in Roussillon, and cantaleu in Nice. French gastronomy and the gastropod are as intimately linked as a snail to its shell: one of the signature dishes of French cuisine is escargots de Bourgogne, or snails stuffed with garlic butter and parsley.*

  * Like frogs’ legs. For some reason, things that might be considered somewhat icky tend to be slathered in butter, garlic and parsley in French cuisine. Perhaps because virtually anything tastes good with this sublime accompaniment.