For centuries, English bakers’ biggest customers were horses

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-horse-bread

by pepys • 4 years ago

271 120 4 years ago

jmercouris• 4 years ago

It’s very interesting that they made bread for horses even! It is pre digested, so that does help!

gruez2• 4 years ago

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).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32239566

undersuit2• 4 years ago

An old bug in Dwarf Fortress had large grazers unable to eat fast enough to not starve. It still amazes me Elephants, Rhinos, Hippos, and Giraffes can eat enough to survive in real life.

madaxe_again3• 4 years ago

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.

OnlyMortal• 4 years ago

Now I’m interested…

gus_massa3• 4 years ago

I agree.

@GP: Photos? A press article? More details? Why donkeys and not mules?

daniel-cussen• 4 years ago

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.

selimthegrim4• 4 years ago

There is literally a legume called horse gram in India, I think livestock eat it though.

tintedfireglass2• 4 years ago

Humans eat it too, and it's my favorite gram!

davchana2• 4 years ago

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.

jewel• 4 years ago

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.

giraffe_lady• 4 years ago

idk if you're joking or what but there was literally on article about exactly this on the front page today.

gerdesj4• 4 years ago

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.

thaumasiotes2• 4 years ago

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.

A heavy horse also needs to eat a lot more than a normal horse.

nradov• 4 years ago

A healthy horse just walking (not doing heavy work) can keep going on fat reserves for several days. Just like most other large mammals.

b1123• 4 years ago

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.

gbronner• 4 years ago

Long distance hikers do this all the time. I think I carried 50# of stuff including food and water made it around 200 miles with leftovers. If I'd been willing to carry more and started out in better shape and was willing to go a bit slower, that distance could have been augmented significantly

jamiek88• 4 years ago

Humans are u uniquely good at covering distance, our only competitors are horses really ‘cos we both sweat effectively. it would be interesting to calculate for a horse.

There’s a lot of variables though!

gruez2• 4 years ago

Not that far, according to another post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32239566

in practice about a month and a half’s logistics buffer is the maximum that’s possible and even doing that is expensive.

malandrew• 4 years ago

lookup Colin O'Brady, the dude who crossed Antarctica solo

whimsicalism• 4 years ago

More forgiving? Sounds rather morbid to me, at least at the end stages.

undersuit2• 4 years ago

There's a reality show, Alone, where the contestants compete to see who can survive the longest in the wilderness. One of the strategies is to come in heavy and hope the additional fat you're carrying gives you the runway to beat the people with lighter frames. It's very morbid, contestants are disqualified every season for health reasons when they start starving with no fat reserves.

jlawson2• 4 years ago

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.

Retric• 4 years ago

Horses can pull significantly more than 2,000lbs on good roads, though it’s dependent on how steep the hills are. Horse pulls use sleds rather than carts and break 5,000 lb per horse.

Pulling a cart on level ground should allow for almost arbitrary weigh as shown by people pulling trains with their teeth etc. The most extreme version of this historically is horses pulling boats through canals, which could hit 50+ tons of cargo per horse across very long distances.

technothrasher• 4 years ago

never grazing

Ha! Good luck. Horses are masters at sneaking a graze wherever and whenever, the instant you stop paying attention.

Melatonic• 4 years ago

But what would get farther carrying their own meals - a horse sized duck or a thousand duck sized horses?

messe• 4 years ago

Of course, horse sized ducks are non-migratory...

BlueTemplar2• 4 years ago

"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 ?

naniwaduni• 4 years ago

Horses are easier to eat than rocket parts if you can afford them, too.

closedloop129• 4 years ago

Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32239566

That earlier submission has the data.

perihelions2• 4 years ago

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.

JetAlone• 4 years ago

I like a little too much this morbid idea of a big ball of domesticated horses, passengers and food, slowly cutting loose bits of its horse-o-sphere to reach an absurdly far away destination. The ecological impact of the horses released to fend for themselves would be profound at the outset... But you could just go Mongolian and have the humans make jerky out of and otherwise consume the horses, for extra mileage.

hoseja2• 4 years ago

Looks like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Gap

littlestymaar• 4 years ago

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?)

Not for oil-powered boats, but for coal-powered steamboats, cargo size taken by coal was a significant factor. Significant enough that sail boats where still the way to get to New Zealand long after coal-power became ubiquitous.

anu7df• 4 years ago

Ah not good. Now you got me thinking of eating the horses rather than jettisoning them.

jvanderbot2• 4 years ago

Was it ever, in history?

Perhaps Water + People over Oceans. More sails --> More people --> More water --> Bigger boat --> More sails, etc etc.

khrbrt• 4 years ago

Was it ever, in history?

Mayan city states were limited in size to how far warriors and their servants could march carrying their own food. No pack animals.

saalweachter• 4 years ago

For land transport, the typical solution is supply dumps over a large number of partial trips.

Your caravan has a max range of N days; you instead go N/3 days, drop 1/3 of your supplies, and then return. Do that twice.

For your third trip, you can load up your caravan, travel N/3 days to your supply dump, and reload using half the cached supplies. Now you travel another N/3 days, drop 1/3 of your load, and then return, stopping for the cached supplies again on the return.

You still consume increasing amounts of resources, but unlike rockets or boats you don't have to carry them all from the start.

a_f• 4 years ago

Was it ever, in history? Maybe not boats, but aircraft. Operation Black-buck in The Falklands war: https://vulcantothesky.org/articles/falklands-war-1982-opera... as another possible example

BlueTemplar2• 4 years ago

(Was it ever, in history?)

Oh yeah, the current situation is highly abnormal.

With one giant exception : wind-powered ships do not suffer from this issue !

https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they...

https://i0.wp.com/acoup.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/orbi...

Using the figures from the Price Edict of Diocletian, we tend to estimate that river transport was five times cheaper than land transport, and sea-transport was twenty times cheaper than land transport.

(Not sure if that river transport of bulk grains was mostly by boats or by barges pulled by pack animals ?)

In fact, Rome itself not only got started as a cross-roads/waterways/seaways (large enough river for big sea ships to go up) for people to gather and trade, it could never have reached its ancient size of 0.5-1 M people without sea shipping !

Archelaos2• 4 years ago

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...

Maultasche• 4 years ago

I find his writing to be very interesting. I hadn't realize that most types of horses used in Europe had evolved to be large enough to not get enough calories from just eating grass, and needed their food to be supplemented with grain.

That was the very first thing I thought of when I read this article about horse bread.

golergka• 4 years ago

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.

supernova87a• 4 years ago

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.

pyrolistical• 4 years ago

No daughter of mine is going to marry a hose bread eater!

dylkil• 4 years ago

“I consider that horse bread is the period analogue for the pellets we use today.”

very interesting

motohagiography• 4 years ago

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).

RappingBoomer• 4 years ago

better than beefaroni, one assumes

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Surprised bakers didn't do regulatory capture to ban cars.

trhway• 4 years ago

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.

thepasswordis• 4 years ago

That makes sense. Horses are quite large.

B1FF_PSUVM• 4 years ago

Picture caption:

"In pre-industrial England, horses took the place of cars, trucks, and trains."

That sounds weirdly Time's Arrow ...

mbg721• 4 years ago

I mean, you could replace it with the caption "War. War never changes,"

kitotik• 4 years ago

As we know all too well in the world of enterprise software, customers and users aren’t always the same mammal.

djur• 4 years ago

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.

hoseja2• 4 years ago

Stoneground flour also probably inherently contains some sand, really destroying your teeeth.

oska• 4 years ago

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

piceas• 4 years ago

More than toothpaste?

i_am_proteus• 4 years ago

I eat stone ground flour (in bread form) almost daily and no dentist has ever registered a complaint.

hardlianotion• 4 years ago

Pepys, you rapscallion, what are you doing here? How is the stone?

Archelaos2• 4 years ago

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.

SideburnsOfDoom• 4 years ago

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.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pumpernickel/

https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/pumpernickel

Ycombigatorz• 4 years ago

Imagine the queues Sainsbury's...

giantg2• 4 years ago

Very interesting. I would be would be too concerned about colic to try it.

vt100• 4 years ago

Now the biggest customers for horse bread will be furries

aspyct2• 4 years ago

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 :)

h2odragon• 4 years ago

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.

aspyct2• 4 years ago

It's actually a lot more stupid than that: fresh bread can get stuck in their throats or elsewhere in their digestive tract.

justsomehnguy• 4 years ago

Bystanders may have suffered some.

Ouch!

bigmattystyles• 4 years ago

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.

cxr• 4 years ago

255 comments on horse meat from 11 days ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116413>

ajb• 4 years ago

"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.

dsq• 4 years ago

In the past, white, refined bread might mean keeping your teeth intact. Sifted flour meant no sand or gravel that could crack them.

For centuries, English bakers’ biggest customers were horses

Related Stories