For many centuries in a row in Russia there was a ban on the consumption of veal. It was even tougher than the Jewish ban on eating pork. Having eaten young beef, the Russian man risked goodbye to life.
This is what the Frenchman Margeret, who visited Russia at the beginning of the 17th century, wrote: "As for bulls and cows, they reproduce in the same amazing way, because in all of Russia they do not eat veal at all, because it contradicts their religion."
Violation of the ban was severely punished by the authorities. The Swedish diplomat Petrei, who was the ambassador to the Russian kingdom at the beginning of the same 17th century, retells the following story: “… were to kill the fattest among them and thus were saved from hunger. Others, who could not eat human meat, were forced to kill a calf from hunger. Upon learning of this, the Grand Duke ordered those who ate veal to burn alive and throw the ashes into the river, and those who ate human flesh were forgiven and delivered from punishment. This is because Muscovites abhor veal and eat it for them is much more sinful than human meat …”.
The Courland traveler and adventurer who served in Russia in the second half of the 17th century, Yakov Reitenfels, in his "Legend of Muscovy", told the legend about how Ivan the Terrible ordered the workers who were building a fortress in Vologda to be thrown into the fire because they were forced by hunger, bought and slaughtered a calf.
It remains a historical fact that in 1606 the boyars managed to set a crowd against False Dmitry I, prompting it to break into the Kremlin only with the message that the tsar was not real, because he was eating veal. Here is what the German Konrad Bussov, who was an eyewitness of those events, wrote: “On Saturday, May 10, the third wedding day, the tsar ordered to cook everything in Polish in the kitchen and, among other dishes, - boiled and fried veal. When the Russian cooks saw this and told everyone, they began to doubt the tsar very much, and the Russians began to say that he was probably a Pole and not a Muscovite, because veal is considered unclean and is not eaten by them."
It is still not fully understood why the Russian church tradition forbade eating veal. There are versions that initially it was caused by the peasant's concern for the preservation of young animals - in the slaughter of a calf in order to feast on its tender meat, he saw an unforgivable waste. Then this custom became a tradition and took on the character of a mystical prohibition.
Another hypothesis says that the ban on veal is related to the ban on colostrum - the calf feeds on milk after birth, and the milk of a calving cow contains colostrum. Probably, this kok is connected with the Old Testament prohibition to eat meat and milk cooked together.
Only at the end of the 18th century veal became a dish of the banquet tables of the nobility, and later it appeared on more modest tables.
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