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Concept
Horse meat
Summary
Horse meat forms a significant part of the culinary traditions of many countries, particularly in Eurasia. The eight countries that consume the most horse meat consume about 4.3 million horses a year. For the majority of humanity's early existence, wild horses were hunted as a source of protein.
During the Paleolithic, wild horses formed an important source of food for humans. In many parts of Europe, the consumption of horse meat continued throughout the Middle Ages until modern times, despite a papal ban on horse meat in 732. Horse meat was also eaten as part of Germanic pagan religious ceremonies in Northern Europe.
The earliest horses evolved on the North American continent, and by about 12,000 BC, they had migrated to other parts of the world, becoming extinct in the Americas. The now-extinct Hagerman horse of Idaho, about the size of a modern-day large pony, is one example of an indigenous New World horse species. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Spaniards, followed by other European settlers, reintroduced horses to the Americas. Some horses became feral, and began to be hunted by the indigenous Pehuenche people of what is now Chile and Argentina. Initially, early humans hunted horses as they did other games; later, they began to raise them for meat, milk and transport. The meat was, and still is, preserved by being sun-dried in the high Andes into a product known as charqui.
France dates its taste for horse meat to the Revolution. With the fall of the aristocracy, its auxiliaries had to find new means of subsistence. The horses formerly maintained by the aristocracy as a sign of prestige ended up being used to alleviate the hunger of the masses. During the Napoleonic campaigns, the surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon's Grand Army, Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, advised the starving troops to eat the meat of horses. At the siege of Alexandria, the meat of young Arab horses relieved an epidemic of scurvy. At the battle of Eylau in 1807, Larrey served horse as soup and as bœuf à la mode.
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