Maybe it was a subconscious thing, but despite years of shopping and browsing at the Nagyvásárcsarnok, we only recently noticed the two stalls side-by-side specializing in horse meat. There's even a horse head hanging above the rows of szalámi and kolbász to advertise it. You can choose from ló téliszalámi (dried salami, Ft 1,198/kilo), ló gyulai kolbász (Gyula sausage, Ft 2,389/kilo), ló párizsi (spam, Ft 799/kilo) and more, including a small selection of bloody ló comb (leg, Ft 849/kilo) and sketchy chunks of apróhús (miscellaneous diced meat, Ft 690/kilo).

Most of the horse meat in the country is broken down into salami and sausage. It has to be - Hungarians generally don’t like horse meat, both because of its history and its sweet taste, according to Levente Zelenák, a bioengineer at the Hungarian Meat Research Institute. As in the English-speaking world where eating horse meat is taboo, most Hungarians wouldn’t dream of chowing down on the stuff. "The horse always held high status in our history. Our predecessors honored them, and they joined them along with other sacred animals to the unseen world after death," explained Zelenák. But in the course of history, things changed. "During World War II, it was a must to eat horse because the German and Russian army took all the livestock kept for human consumption. Unfortunately, after the war, horse meat became the food of the poor." Judging by prices at the Vasárcsárnok, it’s not so cheap anymore, and it’s not even clear who actually shells out for the stuff. The last few times we wandered by, there wasn’t a customer in sight.