Selling Horse Meat to the Victorians
With the price of meat soaring, a new source offered a cheap solution – if only the Victorian public could be convinced of the benefits of hippophagy.
In February 1868 the great and good of London society gathered in the dining room of the Langham Hotel for a remarkable six-course banquet in which every dish was comprised of horse.
The menu, which sparked curiosity and controversy in equal measure, commenced with a horse soup, followed by ‘terrines de foie maigre chevaline’ which, one diner remarked, ‘we may describe as potted horse liver’ and which was ‘decidedly the most horsey food at the dinner – it had a strong and unmistakeable flavour of horse sweat’. Far better reviewed were the horse sausages and a joint weighing 280lbs, which was ‘borne in on the shoulders of four stout servitors, its advent being announced by a herald in a tabard’. Even the fish course of sole had been cooked in horse oil.
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