A horse butcher in Paris

 

Monsieur Jacques Leban owns and runs Boucherie Chevaline at 89 rue Cambronne in Paris. Situated in the 15th arrondissement on a busy shopping street he has a stalwart clientele and received the Viande 1er choix, a prestigious medal for quality meat.

Yes, French people still eat horse meat. While I'm a vegetarian and avoid butcher shops, his business is part of a past that I write about.  There's a history here and you can see below the old milk cans - when the dairy cart and later truck would bring in fresh milk from dairies just outside Paris. Also hanging are the leather horse collars - perhaps used for teams of horses - that led carriages, delivered coal, vegetables, furniture and you name it before cars and trucks. 

Here is Monsieur Leban leaning over his chopping counter, preparing cuts of meat

Notice the meat hook that a side of beef or cow would hang on.

There was a crowd of shoppers and he was busy; taking orders, cutting and whacking, then tying up the order with white waxed paper and string. Old School.

I came back another day when he found time to give me five minutes. He expressed no surprise that I wanted to know his and his shop's history.  He'd worked in the abbatoir - not far away - butcher house that is now Parc Georges Brassens. He remembers as a young man the cattle coming in to Paris on the train via le petit ceinture, an abandoned rail track and cattle getting nervous from the smell of blood. How people ate fresh meat, vegetables and fruits and shopped every day. I didn't ask his age, but he works daily in the shop and looks in his 80's or 90's. He said that when he started as a horse butcher there were five hundred or so. Then it went down to about forty. Now it's only horse butchers including him in Paris. 

Monsieur Leban didn't know it but he became pivotal for a plot point and quite saucy - no pun intended - in my next book. I hope when I can get back to Paris, to give him a copy! Most of all I hope he'll still be there.

Cara - Tuesday