Break from the herd

Mutton is a slippery word. Abroad, it's sheep or lamb. In India, it's almost always goat, which is the leaner, more flavourful, under-appreciated meat

- VIR SANGHVI

My wife is not a vegetarian. She loves a good meat biryani as much as I do. Give her a kakori kabab, and while the high fat content may vanquish her after the second kabab, she will still enjoy it enormously.

But take her to an Indian restaurant abroad and she will suddenly refuse to eat the meat. No mutton kababs for me, she will insist. No lamb at all, she will add. At European restaurants, this refusal will be even more emphatic. Even if I tell her that roast lamb will go perfectly with the very nice Bordeaux I have ordered, she will eat something else.

It's difficult to explain to most people — especially foreigners — why she will eat mutton in India but not abroad. But if you understand the linguistic confusion perpetrated by Indian chefs and restaurateurs, then you will know at once what the problem is.

The truth is that we don't eat lamb in India. We eat goat. For reasons I have never fully understood, restaurants lie about this. They always pretend they are serving lamb. At Indian restaurants abroad, where goat is often hard to come by, chefs substitute lamb for goat in many dishes. They argue that it tastes nearly the same and that anyway, no one can tell the difference.

They are wrong on both counts. Not only does lamb not taste the same as goat, my wife can always tell the difference.

It's not just restaurateurs who muddle the distinction. All of us confuse the issue when we speak of mutton. All over the world, mutton has a specific meaning. It refers to meat from a sheep that is more than a year old. A younger animal is called a lamb. (That's why Mary had a little lamb not a grownup sheep.)

But in India, mutton just means meat from a sheep or a lamb or a goat of any age at all.