This is a dizzying decline from the horse’s heyday as a food in Paleolithic times, when it was one of the chief prey of the cave-dwellers of France, who painted gripping scenes of its pursuit. Horse has been boiled, barbecued and cured in regions of Europe and Asia ever since. Mongol nomads relied on the blood of their steeds as they swept westward. Marco Polo tells how they traveled “without provisions and without making a fire, living only on the blood of their horses; for every rider pierces a vein of his horse and drinks the blood.”

The early church did not look happily on pagan practices in England and Iceland, where horse was consumed as part of religious ritual. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory II instructed the missionary Boniface to “tell them not to eat horses and impose severe punishments to who does it, because they are mean and evil.” The Christian prohibition against eating horse flesh (joining those already adopted by Jews and Muslims) held strong in Europe for centuries. It remains an underpinning to the British and American aversion to this day.

France’s later adoption of horse as a plat du jour stemmed not from callous gourmandise, but from pragmatism. Trying to strengthen its work force to meet the demands of the Industrial Revolution, the French government decreed in 1853 that each person consume 3.5 ounces of meat per day. At that time the price of a pound of horse was half that of beef. The shortages of the Franco-Prussian war (which eventually drove starving Parisians to consume rats and the residents of the zoo) sealed horse’s stature as a cheap, nutritious “food of the people.” Today horse remains largely a food of the working class, but since its cost is now comparable to beef, the once-flourishing horse butcheries of Paris are becoming an endangered species.

Hunger and the desire to nourish one’s children are by far the most effective tramplers of food taboos, and they have been the main forces behind America’s sporadic appreciation of horse as a culinary item. But clannish customs also hold sway. Such practices recently influenced an isolated pocket of our nation as surely as they did Odin-worshippers who ate burnt equine offerings in the god’s name.

Until the late 1970s, the Harvard Faculty Club served horse steaks as a regular menu item. The dish was abandoned only when the rerouting of Harvard Square traffic meant the delivery truck could no longer get through. A 1998 Harvard Crimson article on the history of the club states that “professors still recall the dish fondly.” As they would — its very oddity, even repulsiveness to the outside world reinforced their sense of being members of a unique and special tribe.