Slow Food – Japanese Style – Raw Horse Meat, Raw Liver and Whale Blubber

There’s a saying that you should try anything once except incest and Morris Dancing. Should “anything” include raw horse meat? When my Japanese hosts let slip that they enjoy eating horse meat raw I told them, much to their surprise, that I was up for it. As the picture shows, the meat is intensely red. It’s much leaner than Japanese beef, so some would say that it’s healthier although in my opinion there’s nothing unhealthy at all about animal fat. 

The horse meat tasted good and it was just as tender as raw beef. Next, we had raw liver, which I didn’t enjoy at all, but only on account of its slimy texture.
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This was a sashimi restaurant and we also had a selection of raw fish. I was surprised to be told that one of them was whale fat. Raw blubber is something of a challenge to an Englishman. The easy way to get some enjoyment out of eating sashimi which is mildly unpleasant is to coat it liberally with soy sauce, which effectively disguises the taste. That strategem doesn’t work with blubber as the fat is hard and needs to be chewed well before it can be swallowed and after a few chews the taste of the soy sauce is gone, leaving only the intense blubber taste. A truly unpleasant experience, which I won’t be repeating.