In Dickens' Hard Times, published in 1854, Mr Bounderby regales his dinner guests with talk of consuming horses in his youth, in the guise of "polonies and saveloys". Sneaking horsemeat into processed foods is nothing new. Secretive signals and midnight handovers of horseflesh to dodgy butchers formed an established part of the lurid storytelling of the gutter press. Horsemeat was as unacceptable then as it seems today.
Yet the eating of horses has a long history. Many prehistoric cultures both ate and sacrificed horses, and the ban on horsemeat by Pope Gregory III in 732 was in part an attempt to eradicate pagan rituals in the Germanic states. The ban did, eventually, have its effect, but again, religious beliefs combined with cultural and (increasingly) economic factors in making horsemeat taboo in Europe.
From the early medieval period onwards, the horse grew in importance. Of symbolic status, as a riding animal in peace and war, and beast of burden, it featured in tapestries and paintings as a noble beast, often clad in armour or adorned with fine cloths. It made no sense to consume an animal rich in symbolism and expensive to buy and maintain, when farming gave us ready supplies of other, similar foodstuffs, namely beef and mutton. So entrenched was this view, that by the 17th century, eating horses was banned in most European countries.
By the Victorian period eating horsemeat was associated with desperation and poverty. During the Napoleonic wars the population of some continental cities was forced to consume the only available meat around as they were besieged and starving. And when horse as food started to be popularised in the mid-19th century, it was partly driven by the need to feed growing numbers of urban poor at a time when meat prices were rising sharply. Its proponents, both in England and France, argued that thousands of horses went to waste everyday, mainly elderly cab nags, which were worked to death and then slaughtered for glue and pet food.
In France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland, the medical and culinary establishment lauded horsemeat, and the working classes gradually accepted it. Legally, in France, it could only be sold in designated Chevalines, clearly signposted by the still-visible golden horses heads above the door (it is now available in supermarkets as well). In England, the arguments fell on deaf ears. Indeed, the very idea that we could consume these noble animals, these long-lived friends of the family, was regarded with revulsion. Black Beauty, published in 1877, captured the sentimentality of a nation toward its equine partners.
We also continued to associate poverty and horseflesh. The English working classes were largely outraged at this proposed culinary apartheid. For centuries the English had prided themselves on the quality of their beef. Why eat a meat blatantly comparable to beef, when we could aspire to the real thing? In 1868 at a banquet held by the Society for the Propagation of Horseflesh as an Article of Food, opinions were mixed. "Bad beef" was one verdict. The British Medical Journal pointed out that if this was the opinion when cooked by leading French chefs, it had no chance when subjected to the whims of English ones. The long-held belief that the French had developed their complicated, sauce-based fanciful cuisine merely to disguise the poor quality of their ingredients was once more reinforced. English plain cookery was best.
A few horse butchers did open in the UK (a cash prize was offered as an incentive at one stage), often, at first, to serve continental refuges during the first world war. Indeed horsemeat was eaten during both world wars, even being subject to rationing at one stage. In the 1950s some butchers continued to trade, but the growing desire to eat "posh" cuts and the increasing culinary influence of the US, whose population largely shared our repugnance, meant their closure over the decades that followed. Despite the facts – Italy consumes more horsemeat than France, and in Switzerland horse restaurants flourish – we continue to fear inadvertent consumption of horse when abroad, and regard it with a culturally conceived revulsion which has become part of the British national identity. Eat horse? It's just not British.