“Agreeable To The Taste” Like A Sirloin Steak: The People Who Ate Mammoth Meat In The 20th Century

One story from the turn of the 20th century involves Otto Ferdinandovich Herz, a Russian scientist, who had returned to St Petersburg after unearthing a mammoth carcass from the ice near the Berezovka River in Siberia.

While the mammoth was being stuffed and mounted for display at the Imperial Museum, Herz realized that the flesh would not be required and essentially go to waste, so he decided to serve it at an elaborate banquet. He encouraged the guests to bring their own ancient foods, including a type of grain found among ancient Egyptian ruins.

An account of the meal said it was an overwhelming success: “particularly the course of mammoth steak, which all the learned guests declared was agreeable to the taste, and not much tougher than some of the sirloin furnished by butchers of today.”

A similar anecdote from James Oliver Curwood, an American traveler and author, who was exploring in the upper stretches of North America in 1913 alongside a group of Indigenous people. 

Upon finding a frozen mammoth that had recently been exposed by a falling cliffside, they decided to dine out on the discovery. He commented: “The flesh was of a deep red or mahogany color, and I dined on a steak an inch and a half thick […] The flavor of the meat was old not unpleasant but simply old and dry. That it had lost none of its life-sustaining elements was shown by the fact that the dogs throve upon it.”

Arguably the most famous account of mammoth-munching in the modern era comes from The Explorers Club, an eccentric scientific society based in the US that included the likes of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first to summit Mount Everest; the adventurous President Theodore Roosevelt; and Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

At their annual dinner on January 13, 1951, mammoth was purportedly the star dish of the evening. The prehistoric meat was said to have come from Akutan Island in Alaska, with portions brought back to New York to uphold the club’s tradition of serving rare and exotic dishes, ranging from fried tarantulas to goat eyes and turtle soup.

However, many suspect this is an urban legend. A tissue sample from the 47th Explorers Club Annual Dinner (ECAD) still sits in a jar at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Although assumed to be mammoth flesh, it turned out that the vial was actually labelled as a South American giant ground sloth.

In 2016, scientists at Yale decided to investigate and settle the question once and for all. Using genetic analysis, they discovered it was neither a mammoth nor a sloth, but a modern sea turtle.

Sea turtle soup was officially on the menu of the 47th ECAD, so it’s possible the samples somehow became muddled up, although the researchers believe that’s “unlikely.” 

“Our archival research suggests that the prehistoric meat served at the 1951 ECAD was a jocular publicity stunt that mistakenly wound its way into fact,” they wrote in their conclusion.

“Although there was one previous incident of a paleontologist mistaking a ground sloth for a sea turtle, it still seems odd that a skilled naturalist like Howes, as well as other Explorers Club members and journalists, continued to believe in the authenticity of the sloth meat even after Dodge admitted it was a playful prank,” they added.

As this tale suggests, mammoths are not the only prehistoric beast that it would be theoretically possible to consume. 

The soft tissues of several other species, some of which are now extinct, have been excavated from the permafrost of the Northern Hemisphere, including woolly rhinos, wolves, cave lions, and birds. While it would be difficult to organize, it would be possible to sample their flesh in an ethically dubious Ice Age BBQ.