Ivo Delingpole

Would you drink fermented horse milk?

  • From Spectator Life
(Getty)

To my great disappointment, I was never (knowingly) fed qarta – a popular dish of boiled and pan-fried horse anus served without sauce or spices. I did, however, get to try the next best thing – kymyz, mares’ milk fermented in a goatskin. It was the second day of a horse trek in Kyrgyzstan and it had begun to hail. Not exactly golf ball-sized, but close enough to the golf ball sweets you bite into to find bubble gum. The horses coped, perhaps because getting pelted with hail is a fair trade for not being on a Kyrgyz menu. We stopped under a tree and our guide’s blank stares gave no indication of whether the weather was normal or not. The following two hailstorms suggested it was. By the time we reached our yurt camp for the night, my rain jacket was a sodden testament to the fact that ‘water-resistant’ does not equal ‘waterproof’ and my jeans were soaked.

One of the mare’s hind legs was promptly placed into a sling and the milk squirted into a metal bucket

The aching waddle to the yurt felt like a victory lap.

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