What’s for Dinner? Saddle of Dobbin

Many cultures don’t approve of eating horse flesh. To Jews, it’s not kosher because the horse doesn’t chew cud and its hoof isn’t cloven. Though it’s not forbidden in Islam, the Prophet himself did not eat it and neither do most Muslims.

In Europe, the Romans despised eating horse meat and Christian authorities ultimately opposed it too, though Iceland got an exemption during the Middle Ages because its agriculture was so marginal. (Icelanders continue to eat horse to this day.) By the 17th century, Europe’s problem with horse meat had gone from religious opposition to a feeling that it was just a low-class food, something eaten only by the unscrupulous or the desperately poor. Outside France, you rarely see a horse butcher in Europe today.

Horse meat is readily eaten in China, which has very few food taboos, but the world capital of hippophagy is Central Asia, where they have lots of horses and often not much else. The Mongols and fellow nomads such as the Kazakhs eat whatever animals they herd, and there are some who herd nothing but horses.

In the late ‘80s, somebody in the former Soviet Union had the bright idea of publishing a lavish color-illustrated book titled “National Cuisine of the Kazakhs”: a sort of “Kazakhstan the Beautiful” cookbook. This might have been the most poorly conceived coffee-table book ever; Kazakh food is hearty but not photogenic. Shot after shot showed a crude chunk of meat on a plate surrounded by fussy food-stylist tchotchkes--flowers, Chinese bowls, carved wooden spoons, colorful folk fabrics. The total effect was so brutal that the book could have been made up by a couple of vegetarians as propaganda.

It also included a diagram on the cuts of the horse as the Kazakhs butcher them out. FYI, they’re roughly the same cuts as you’d get from a sheep or a cow (shoulder, ribs, leg, etc.), except that there appears to be a particularly tender cut in the leg called zhaya , and then there’s the zhal , evidently a polliwog-shaped lump of fat under the mane.