Strange Foods. Jerry Hopkins

served with the dog’s blood and bile. Unlike Vietnam, where most of the dogs that are cooked are tender puppies, the adults wind up on the plate in Thailand, so tough that minced is the easiest to chew and most digestible.

      In Korea, hundreds, perhaps thousands of restaurants serve rich soups (costing about $10 for a medium sized bowl), casseroles ($16 per serving), and steamed meat served with rice ($25). It is, as in other places, technically illegal to sell cooked dog meat, and restauranteurs do so under threat of having their licenses revoked. However, an appeals court in Seoul in 1997 acquitted a dog-meat wholesaler, ruling that dogs were socially accepted as food. Continuing government concern about the nation’s image has led to periodic crackdowns, causing some restaurants to remove their outside signs or move from main streets to small lanes, away from the usual tourist haunts. And many now identify the special dishes not as dog, but instead use names like “Soup of Invigoration.”

      As a protein source for human consumption, cats have a briefer history than dogs. At least, there are fewer historical references and while felines continue to find their way to the supper table from South America to Asia, the consumption level is comparatively quite low. This may be explained by the fact that through the ages, human regard for the cat has swung so widely—from worship to blasphemy and back—and at neither extreme did the small creature with the heart-warming purr and sharp claws ever seem as right for a stew or grill as their larger relatives, the cougar, the panther, the leopard, the lion, and the tiger.

      There are, of course, numerous cases of the domestic cat being eaten for survival, just as Amundsen ate his sled dogs in the last century. In 1975, for example, the British correspondent Jon Swain was held captive in the French embassy in Phnom Penh following the invasion of the Cambodian capital by the Khmer Rouge. “With no end to our internment in sight, the shortage of food was becoming serious,” he wrote in River of Time (1996). “Reluctantly, Jean Menta, a Corsican adventurer, and Dominique Borella, the mercenary who had been keeping a low profile in case he was recognized, strangled and skinned the embassy cat. The poor creature put up a spirited fight and both men were badly scratched. A few of us ate it, curried. The meat was tender like chicken.”

      So, too, in 1996, cats were skinned and grilled in Argentina under the media’s harsh glare, causing an uproar in homes throughout the country and in the legislature. The press and politicians asked, were people so poor they had to eat pets? The answer, of course, was yes.

      The same year, in Australia, Richard Evans, a member of Parliament, recommended the country do everything possible to eradicate the country’s eighteen million feral and domestic cats by 2020 to prevent them killing and estimated three million birds and animals every year. John Wamsley, the managing director of Earth Sanctuaries, went a step further, urging people to catch and eat feral cats, recommending what he called “pussy-tail stew.” Another uproar shook the media.

      It isn’t always need that puts the cat in the pot. At Guang’s Dog and Cat restaurant in Jiangmen, a city in southern China, the owner, Wu Lianguang, told reporters in 1996, “Business couldn’t be better. The wealthier the Chinese become, the more concerned they are about their health and there’s nothing better for you than cat meat.”

      In northern Vietnam in the 1990s, cat joined dog on many restaurant menus in the belief that asthma could be cured by eating cat meat and that a man’s sexual prowess could be aroused or enhanced with the help of four raw cat galls pickled in rice wine. As a food, it was enjoyed raw, marinated, grilled over charcoal, or cut into bite-sized chunks and dunked into a Mongolian hotpot with vegetables. According to a report from Agence France Presse, a dozen restaurants specializing in cat meat opened in just one district of Hanoi and about 1,800 cats were butchered every year in each of them, with the cost to the consumer rising from US$3.50 to $11 in just two years.

      Cat meat-generally not so greasy as dog—was a favorite of Hanoi gourmets until 1997, when the government forbade all further slaughter. Why? Official figures showed that as the country’s cat population dropped, the number of rats multiplied at an alarming rate, ravaging up to thirty per cent of grain produced in some districts around the capital city. The restaurants were held to blame.

      The same year on the other side of the world, in Lima, Peru, a last-minute appeal from Peruvian animal-lovers persuaded authorities to halt a festival of cat cookery intended to celebrate a local saint’s day. Organizers of the event announced with regret that the annual festival honoring St. Efigenica, scheduled in the southern coastal town of Canete, had been canceled at the insistence of animal rights activists. However, cat continues to be considered a delicacy and it remains on local menus, without any public display.

      A Swiss chef who worked in a five-star hotel in Asia smiled when I mentioned cat cuisine. He said he ate cat in northern Italy and enjoyed it, and if anyone wanted to do the same and lacked a recipe, it tasted so much like squirrel or rabbit, all they had to do was find a recipe for one of those and substitute.

      For now, the eating of dog—and to a lesser degree, cat-seems to have a healthy future, especially in Asia, where there is no social stigma attached. And in most cases, where laws forbid their consumption, those bans likely will go unenforced. This may change in time, of course. Chang Moon Joon, a managing director of the Korea Animal Rescue Association, and a strong opponent of dog eating, said in a press release issued in 1998 that “since young people these days don’t eat dog meat, the market itself will dwindle and in twenty years’ time it will disappear.”

      That may be so. Still, there is no accounting for, or predicting, the world’s eating habits, nor the changes occurring rapidly in the harvest of unusual crops. A few years ago, ostrich was only a big, funny-looking bird. Today it’s being farmed in large numbers in South Africa, Australia, China, and North America, where it is being praised as an answer to the need for low-cost, high-value protein. Canines and felines could fill the same role.

      In April 1871, Le Monde Illustré depicted scenes of the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris, when market stalls selling cat and dog meat drew lines of people.

      horse

      My friend Richard Lair, an elephant expert living in Thailand-where he says he has eaten just about everything except elephant—was attending San Francisco State University in the early 1960s when he was introduced to horse meat. A pal of his was a chef who often shopped for his dinner at a pet store, the only place where horse meat could be purchased (in America) easily-this, because it was regarded (in America) as food fit only for dogs.

      Horse Tartare

      5-8 oz. lean horse flank or rump (per person)

      1 egg yolk

      Worcestershire sauce or hot pepper sauce to taste

      Salt and pepper to taste

      1 garlic clove, minced

      1 tbs. red onion, chopped

      1 tbs. parsley, chopped

      1 tsp. capers

      Catsup, olive oil, soy sauce

      Grind meat and form into a ball, working in egg yolk, garlic, Worcestershire sauce or hot pepper sauce, salt and pepper. Flatten one side so the ball will hold its position on a plate. Place the onion, parsley, and capers on the plate around the meat; these are then added to the fork while eating. Serve with catsup, olive oil, more Worcestershire sauce, and soy sauce as desired for additional flavoring.

      This gentleman knew the various cuts of horse, my friend told me, and he knew fresh meat when he saw it, so when the “pet food” met his approval, he purchased some of the rump and took it home and prepared the horse meat in the same way he prepared beef bourguignon, coating the cubes of lean meat with flour and frying them in a heavy saucepan with onions and shallots, and perhaps a tot of brandy, set aflame just before serving with potatoes and vegetables.

      Horse meat? Some Euro-Americans bristle at the thought. This was, after all, the mammal most closely identified with human activity. From approximately 2,500 B.C., the animal has been an indispensable part of society, primarily as a beast of burden and a means of transportation.