While modern American sensibilities have no taste for horse meat, it was different during the world wars, when beef and other meat were scarce. Vendors at Seattle’s Pike Place Market offered horse meat as an alternative, especially since it was government-inspected but not rationed.
Below is a picture of three men boldly confronting that taboo and raising another sign announcing in big letters “horse meat.” They promise to have it by Monday — inspected by the government and not rationed, so always available as long as there are Montana horses to slaughter.
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| Signs advertising horse meat (“NOT RATIONED”) outside a Seattle butcher shop sometime during WWII. (Courtesy of Lawton Gowey) |
While the name of the Pike Place Market business offering the equine steaks is the “Montana Horse Meat Market,” the buyer could not know for certain that all this promised horse meat would actually come from the Big Sky Country. They may have wished it were so. In 1942, the likely year for this sign-lifting, much of the Montana range was still open.
Partners Lewis Butchart and Andrew Larson were already selling beef and pork at 1518 Pike Place in the late 1930s, but then with the war and the rationing, they brought out the horses. In a 1951
Seattle Times advertisement, they used the Montana name and offered specialties like “young colt meat, tender delicious like fine veal.” “Montana” is still used in the 1954 City Directory, but not long after.
In the mid-1960s (and perhaps later) one could still find a smaller selection of cheval cuts (the French name for the meat the French often eat) at 1518 Pike Place. Market resident Paul Dunn remembers buying horse kidneys there for his cat. Those humans who have tried it commonly describe the meat as “tender, slightly sweet and closer to beef than venison.” Those who promote the meat might note that it is lower in fat and higher in protein than beef. That is not likely to change the average modern American’s view about eating an animal most view as a pet.
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| Mr. D’s Greek Deli now holds the Pike Place address where Montana – and perhaps other – horse meat was sold for many years. (Courtesy of Google Street View) |
(This original article was written by
Paul Dorpat and published on
The Seattle Times)
