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> For contemporary Westerners who prize whole grain over processed flour, the horse bread of bran and rye, once debased as a bread of poverty, is usually the crowd favorite for its sweet, nuanced taste. “It’s fabulous,” he says. “It’s absolutely fabulous.”
Worth pointing out that both grain crops and the processing thereof have changed significantly in recent centuries, resulting in a tastier (and generally more nutritious, in the case of whole grains) product. Wholemeal flour used for horse bread would have probably been lower both in protein and digestible carbohydrates right from the start, and that's before accounting for indigestible grit and chaff left in it from the grinding process. Grinding was also less consistent, which further degraded the texture of the finished loaf. The exact same ingredients on paper are fundamentally different today than they were in the past -- sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
Stoneground flour also probably inherently contains some sand, really destroying your teeeth.
Probably contains some particles from the grindstone yes, but I wouldn't think in anywhere enough quantity to have a particularly deleterious effect on people's teeth
I eat stone ground flour (in bread form) almost daily and no dentist has ever registered a complaint.
More than toothpaste?
They still make it here in our very rural corner of Portugal, although it’s more for the donkeys - they’re used as beasts of burden still, usually for olives in more remote or inaccessible groves - some are on really steep hill slopes, impossible for mechanisation. It’s for the dogs, too. Not 100% sure of the recipe but it’s rye, olive leaves and leftovers from pressing, and I think oat bran - stuff smells awful and has the density of a brick, but keeps for ages and makes for a handy meal on the hoof.
There is literally a legume called horse gram in India, I think livestock eat it though.
Yes, although its Punjabi Name is not literal translation of Horse Gram, but its pretty much known that give this to Horses to give them strength. We people eat it lightly roasted, and munch on it, and in traditional cooking way too. Chana Daal.
But its attached to Horses only, not Buffalo, Cow, Donkey etc.
Now I’m interested…
Korea [North Korea] made food for donkeys too, their salvation from mechanization and therefore depending on imports America could deprive them of. Donkeys? America couldn't deprive them of.
Donkeys?
Loyal.
The article makes me wonder what the maximum range for a horse would be if carrying its own meals, never grazing, but drinking water along the way as needed.
Seems like it'd sort of be like the rocket equation, but more forgiving.
Like the rocket equation, it'd be a logarithmic function with no upper bound (assuming an unlimited starting supply of horses). You start off with a large caravan and gradually jettison horses as the food runs out. Both food and horse count decay exponentially, but they decay together at the same rate, so there's always the correct amount of food for the remainers.
The same law applies to global fuel transport: can you export oil halfway around the planet, on a boat that itself runs on oil? There's a rocket equation hidden in that. But the constants are really good (oil is energy-dense; planets are small); so it's not an important law that's ever-present in economics, in the way the rocket equation is ever-present in space. (Was it ever, in history?)
I read a short story once about a world where oceans were too large for oil-powered ships to cross. Anyone know which story I'm thinking of? It was an impossibly large planet too vast for humans to comprehend, and we could only just scratch the surface exploring small corners of it. I remember it had nuclear-powered ekranoplans.
Assume a spherical horse ...
OK are we talking a Mustang or a Shire or Clydesdale? Carrying the food or dragging a wagon?
I don't know enough about horses but a heavy horse (Shirehorse, Suffolk Punch or Clydesdale in the UK) can drag quite a decent load. Granddad's Clydesdale "Damson" could make a furrow with a plough all day, back in the day - bloody hard work. Ironically, that was in Devon - Scottish horse in Shire land! He got a Ferguson tractor later but they kept the horses as well.
I think we would run out of UK for a single horse load unless doing the full Land's End to John o'Groats (or trying to cross the Irish Sea) but a bigger land might need a re-fuel or two.
Bret Devereaux recently blogged about military logistics and gave some figures: https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...
He also pointed to Wayne E. Lee's article on grass as a limiting factor in Mongol warfare, which I found very interesting: https://www.historynet.com/mongols-on-the-march-the-logistic...
If a man dragged a little cart behind him, and also wore a backpack, he could go months on dense food.
Even if you just put two 10kg bags of oats in your backpack, that's going to last.
20kg? Soldiers have that much to carry, and often more, with weight of gun, ammo, rations, bedroll, and more... yet march day long.
> never grazing
Ha! Good luck. Horses are masters at sneaking a graze wherever and whenever, the instant you stop paying attention.
> Seems like it'd sort of be like the rocket equation, but more forgiving.
You're absolutely right:
https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...
> The problem in a nutshell is that anything available to these armies prior to the advent of the railroad that can carry food, also eats food (except for boats, but rivers and coastlines may well not go where you want to go). We may call this problem the ‘tyranny of the wagon equation’ as a number of readers have noticed the similarity to the tyranny of the rocket equation.
Well, no amount of weight can make the horse slide backwards and there's no cost to taking more time. So under a simple model, you just want to add so much food that the horse can barely move.
If the horse eats 20lbs per day (as noted in the article), say it can barely pull 2000lbs on a good quality cart. So 100 days of food. Then just figure out how far it can go in 100 days.
In one day horses can go 80-160km, but they need rest after a few days of this. So say it can do 50km per day sustained and unweighted, 25km at high weight (early in the journey).
Split roughly in half into weight/unweighted days, we get a total distance of about 3,750km for a self-powered horse.
That's almost Lisbon to Moscow, or almost New York to Seattle.
Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32239566
That earlier submission has the data.
"Tyranny of the wagon equation" ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32239566
Note how non-steppe horses were too big to subsist on grazing alone !
P.S.: Typically *less* forgiving because it's easier to dump parts of the rocket, especially for a return trip ?
idk if you're joking or what but there was literally on article about exactly this on the front page today.
More forgiving? Sounds rather morbid to me, at least at the end stages.
But what would get farther carrying their own meals - a horse sized duck or a thousand duck sized horses?
"Horse bread also allowed professional bakers to turn their leftovers into a commodity. [...] The most sought after form of bread was white bread, which required that a baker sift the whole-grain, stone-ground wheat they received from the miller, removing the grain’s hard outer layer, called “bran,” from the white flour. After turning the white flour into expensive white bread, bakers could recycle their leftover bran to make horse bread"
Makes a lot of economic sense - what they don't mention is that horses can get energy from fibre, while people can't, so this is biologically efficient as well as economically.
I think some of my first baking experiments during pandemic came out a bit like "horse bread".
I gave up shortly thereafter and returned to the glory of old trustworthy maltodextrin-enhanced, vitamin-enriched sliced white bread and found other equally unsuccessful hobbies for those extra 2 hours per day.
In light of this, the whole thing about "Pumpernickel" meaning "pain pour Nicol" (where Nicol is a horse) (1) makes a bit more sense. I don't mean that it's necessarily true, just that it's a less of an absurd, nonsensical claim.
Did the English eat horse meat historically? In the north of France where I grew up, it was still on the menu in the early 90s at my grandparents’ and I honestly didn’t mind it. I’m not sure if it’s still popular, but beyond the work done by horses, if you could turn your bad tasting food into meat, then it makes even more sense.
255 comments on horse meat from 11 days ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116413>
As we know all too well in the world of enterprise software, customers and users aren’t always the same mammal.
My brother had a bakery and my parents had a farm. The leftover bread from the bakery was fed to the cattle. I joked: We should market the meat as croissant beef.
Important note : fresh bread can kill horses.
Only hard, dessicated bread can be given. But even that is not ideal.
Generally speaking, don't feed animals that are not yours, please :)
Many modern horses have easily upset digestion; which can indeed be a serious medical issue.
A horse raised with or adapted to a more varied diet will be a bit more robust. I've known a horse that was fond of sausage and stripped fruit trees and blackberry bushes at every opportunity, her digestive distress after those episodes was never that serious for her. Bystanders may have suffered some.
Surprised bakers didn't do regulatory capture to ban cars.
While not by bakers, the Red Flag laws did significantly slow the car progress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts
>It has been claimed that the restrictions in the earlier act were advocated by those with interests in the UK railway industry and horse-drawn carriages.
It’s very interesting that they made bread for horses even! It is pre digested, so that does help!
What I find even more interesting is that we bred horses to be so big that they can't survive on grass (their natural food) alone.
>Now the small native ponies of the Steppe can subsist entirely off of grass, but the sort of horses available in the agrarian world are bred too big and strong to eat entirely grass. Their nutrition requirements are too high and so they require feed, at least some 4.5kg of it per day assuming local grass is available along with time to let the horses graze it (during which the wagon is, of course, stopped).
In the past, white, refined bread might mean keeping your teeth intact. Sifted flour meant no sand or gravel that could crack them.
Picture caption:
"In pre-industrial England, horses took the place of cars, trucks, and trains."
That sounds weirdly Time's Arrow ...
I mean, you could replace it with the caption "War. War never changes,"
No daughter of mine is going to marry a hose bread eater!
That makes sense. Horses are quite large.
> “I consider that horse bread is the period analogue for the pellets we use today.”
very interesting
Pellets today are beet mostly pulp afaik. Protein (flax) prices have gone through the roof in the last few months, so we've been seeing more whole soy (cheaper) in the feed mix, and pellets of pulp. It's still high in sugars, and too much beet pulp can be like having a 1200lb toddler tweaking on ketchup (red dye and sugar).
Very interesting. I would be would be too concerned about colic to try it.
better than beefaroni, one assumes
Pepys, you rapscallion, what are you doing here? How is the stone?
Imagine the queues Sainsbury's...
Now the biggest customers for horse bread will be furries