Rude Food by Vir Sanghvi: Telling the goats from the sheep

Indian food is hardly ever made with lamb but our chefs lie about this because they are too embarrassed to admit they use goat

My wife does not like chicken. Take her to a kabab restaurant and she will refuse to eat the chicken tikka. A barrah kabab or a raan will always be preferred. As for biryani, it must always be made with mutton. There is, according to her, no such thing as a good chicken biryani. A chicken burger is a joke, she says; a waste of good bread.

Goat is now a trendy, sustainable lean meat and sales are going up abroad as a new generation abandons the prejudices of the past

Lamb is actually a very different kind of meat from goat. It’s much fattier and smells different

The Rolling Stones was so fascinated by the novelty of eating goat meat that they called their album Goat’s Head Soup, with a corresponding cover artwork (left), though it released with an alternate cover (right)

All the great meat dishes of Indian cuisine use goat. So, many Indians like goat, not lamb, baffling chefs who’ve been trying to fudge the difference between the two

There is not much good quality lamb in India so nearly all the meat (mutton) you will be served at restaurants will be goat

The widespread use of goat as the favoured red meat is a peculiarly South Asian phenomenon. In most of the world they use lamb

Goat is a leaner meat and has much less saturated fat than pork, lamb, beef and even chicken