saddle up, it's horse for dinner

Columnist

Thursday 17 January 2013

I WAS not aware there is a burger police with a CSI unit that checks your dinner for horse DNA.

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Tom Shields

The discovery of minute quantities of cuddy content midst the other animal flesh has caused a furore. Some 10 million burgers have been removed from supermarket shelves and probably not passed on to those folk going hungry but sent to a landfill site.

Would you eat horse meat? Lots of people do There will no doubt be a collapse in supermarket share prices, chief executives will be sacked, and major inquiries instigated so that folk can be protected from horse meat. There was even a statement from Prime Minister David Cameron. Shops will be besieged by angry customers shouting: "How dare you sell us burgers with 0.01% horse flesh. Give us instead a greasy pie with a filling of sheep's nose, bull's testicle, and any other fat and gristle that can be mechanically retrieved from a dead beast." Apparently, it's damned foreigners from Spain and the Netherlands who have put us on a part-equine diet via unsuspecting meat processors in Ireland. This paranoia reminds me of an investigation by a tabloid newspaper to prove takeaway lamb curries contained meat from other, more unusual, species. All the samples turned out to be mutton dressed as lamb with no kangaroos or Alsatian dogs. Landed with hundreds of portions of perfectly kosher bhoona lamb, the newspaper changed tack and did a tasting survey to find Scotland's tastiest curry. But I digress. One of the burgers tested, Tesco's value brand, had 29% horse meat. I would have been first in the queue to buy such a delicacy. I write this having just lunched on a 100% horse burger from Keisy, my favourite supermarket in Barcelona. Potro, as the meat is called, is sweeter, leaner, more tender and altogether better for you than fattier species. I feed it to visitors on a regular basis and eight out of ten prefer it to cow meat (even after I tell them what it is). I would serve potro more often but it is more expensive than the cattle variety. Most cuts are delicious but avoid the saddle. I used all my horsey jokes in previous epistles on this subject. Mare's the pity. If the wean says can she have a pony, agree and ask if she wants fries with it.

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Food and drink

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saddle up, it's horse for dinner

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