Eating Zoo Animals: A Paris Christmas Dinner Menu from 1870
A Famous Chef Turned Zoo Animals into Haute Cuisine During the 1870 Siege of Paris
A different kind of Christmas Story about a special holiday meal in Paris & how fast “unthinkable” becomes normal.
TL;DR
On Christmas Day, 1870, during the Franco-Prussian siege of Paris, elite diners ate zoo animals while the rest of the city ate rats and horse meat.
The unsettling part isn’t what they ate.
It’s how reasonable it felt at the time.
There are also suggested wine pairings for elephant, which you don’t see very often.
A Christmas Story (Just Not the Usual One)
Christmas stories usually arrive pre-packaged. Familiar foods. Familiar rituals. Tables set to reassure us that things are stable, abundant, and continuous. That whatever else is happening in the world, at least this part still makes sense.
This is also a Christmas story. Just not a comforting one.
It’s about a holiday meal in Paris. About what people ate when they had already eaten almost everything else. About how quickly the unthinkable becomes acceptable once circumstances narrow the choices. And about how culture, even under siege, insists on keeping up appearances.
I’m sharing it again this Christmas not for shock value, but because it’s quietly instructive. Holiday tables have always been historical documents. They record what was available, what was valued, and what people were willing not to question.
With that in mind, here’s a different kind of Christmas dinner.
Day 99 of the Siege
Christmas Dinner
I first heard this story from a friend who has a great sense for odd history (and a sometimes alarming taste in reading material). He told me to look up a Christmas menu from Paris, 1870.
Then he sent me a photo from a book. I assumed he was exaggerating. He wasn’t.
The heading reads: “25 December 1870. The 99th Day of the Siege.”
By Christmas in 1870, Paris had been cut off from the outside world for over three months during the Franco-Prussian War.
No food convoys. No livestock. No reliable supplies of anything. What remained was whatever had already been inside the city when the gates closed. Including the animals at the Jardin des Plantes.
The zoo could not feed them. So it sold them.
Then people ate them. Sometimes, fancily.
Two of those animals were the elephants Castor and Pollux, minor celebrities in their day, familiar to generations of Parisians. They were purchased by butcher Débos and quickly made their way into restaurant kitchens. Including one of the most famous restaurants of the day, Voisin.
At Voisin, chef Alexandre Étienne Choron decided that if Paris was going to starve, it would at least starve elegantly.
What he produced is now known simply as the Christmas Zoo Menu. it is this that Choron is best remembered for, no matter what else he had done.
fast decline
By Christmas, this menu was not shocking to Parisians.
The city had exhausted food reserves early. Fresh meat went first, then salted and preserved supplies. Bakers diluted flour with, um, stuff. Butter vanished. Milk became rare.
Then they ate the horses.
It happened within weeks.
Horse meat was eaten in France before then, even if it was associated with poverty or maybe medical diets. It was quietly sold before, but during the siege, it went mainstream. Specialized boucheries chevalines opened across Paris - with signage and storefronts. Menus adapted. Recipes were published. In the first months alone, roughly 70,000 horses were slaughtered and eaten.
Once the horse population was gone, people still ate meat, just a bit lower on the hierarchy. Dogs. Cats. Rats. All were butchered, sold, priced, and named as what they were.
Hunger does broaden the palate.
Painter Édouard Manet, writing to his wife, described cat, dog, and rat butchers operating in Paris, noting that horse meat was a luxury when it could be found at all.
Ironically, letters moved more freely than food during the siege. Mail left Paris by hot air balloon, drifting over enemy lines. Supplies did not.
A painting by Narcisse Chaillou shows orderly queues of Parisians waiting for meats that would once have been unthinkable.
By December, the moral boundary had very clearly moved. The zoo menu did not cross a line so much as follow a path that had been laid by necessity.
That said, people sitting down that day still had no warning. Just a menu that unfolded, line by line, into something between culinary bravado and survival theater.
Stuffed donkey head.
Elephant consommé.
Roast camel, “English style”?
Kangaroo stew.
Bear chops in pepper sauce.
Wolf haunch in venison sauce.
Cat garnished with rats.
Antelope terrine with truffles.
For dessert, rice pudding with jam.
Gruyère for the cheese course.
And quite a wine list. Mouton Rothschild 1846. Château Palmer 1864. Romanée-Conti 1858. Whatever survived the cellar survived the siege.
This while the rest of Paris was eating rats.
The elephants reportedly sold for 27,000 francs or roughly €160,000 today. There is no record I can find for what the meal cost, but it doesn’t really matter. This wasn’t just a dinner: it was food theater for people who could afford to pretend the world had not collapsed.
Not everyone was impressed.
English writer Henry Labouchère, who dined at Voisin, later wrote that he had eaten a slice of Pollux for dinner. He found elephant meat tough and oily, and advised against it for English families so long as more conventional meats were available.
Well, yes.
Voisin was not the only restaurant taking advantage of the zoo’s offerings. Restaurant Peters, near the Opéra, served elephant fillet with Madeira sauce for New Year’s, along with bear and peacock. Others followed suit.
When the Gates Opened
The siege of Paris ended on January 28, 1871, after 132 days.
France surrendered. As part of the armistice, it agreed to repay Germany for the cost of the war. German troops entered the city, and with them came food. Real food. Flour. Meat. Bread.
Relief did not arrive cleanly. Some of the first convoys sparked riots and pillaging. Hunger does not switch off politely. The police were largely powerless.
Within weeks, restaurant menus normalized. Familiar cuts returned. Castor and Pollux slipped out of conversation.
Paris moved on.
The zoo did not. It reopened with smaller animals, but it would be decades before elephants returned to the Jardin des Plantes.
The menu, however, survived.
Christmas
What stays with me is not the shock value. It’s how quickly taste, ethics, and normalcy bend under pressure.
Not collapse. Bend.
This wasn’t barbarism. It was refinement under constraint. The performance of order maintained as long as possible.
We like to believe we are different now. Better supplied. More rational. More humane.
Normal Until It Isn’t
We eat things today that will almost likely require footnotes.
Industrial chicken, produced at its current scale for barely seventy years, accelerated into its modern form after the Second World War.
Fast-food beef followed, industrialized earlier but exploding alongside highways, refrigeration, and franchising in the 1950s and 60s.
Bluefin tuna, which are kind of the lions of the sea (they are top predators), became an everyday thing in delis, the cheap stuff, for less than a century before being driven into scarcity.
These foods feel normal now. Necessary. Celebratory, even. Their costs are externalized just far enough away to feel abstract. Their systems defended by habit rather than logic.
That’s usually how it works.
The parallel isn’t spectacle.
It’s amnesia.
Musical acompaniment
Boris Vian - Les joyeux bouchers (1956)
Butchers happily going about their work. The melody is light. The tone playful. The lyrics, however, are merciless. Vian lists animals, cuts of meat, blood, and routine violence with a grin, showing how easily it all disappears once it’s wrapped in habit, labor, and smiles.