Here is a question that rarely gets a proper airing in popular food culture: when did the world start eating rare meat?

I had been thinking about how much of European cooking, particularly for beef and lamb, treats medium rare as the default, the aspiration, the marker of a meal properly prepared. And yet, across vast swathes of the world – Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, North Africa – meat is cooked through. Not pink. Not blushing. Done. What we in the Western food world somewhat dismissively call “well done.”

And that led me to a second, sharper question: when exactly did well-done become synonymous with dried out? Because if you think about it for even a moment, cooking meat all the way through while keeping it succulent and tender probably demands more skill, not less, than pulling a steak at medium rare.

It turns out the answers to these questions unravel some deeply held assumptions about what constitutes good cooking.

A brief history of rareness

The word “rare” applied to meat traces back to the older English word “rear,” meaning underdone. The earliest print reference appears around 1615, in Gervase Markham’s The English Hus-wife. But here is the interesting thing: Markham actually warns against it, describing rareness as unwholesome. The concept existed, but it was not initially a compliment.

The preference for underdone beef solidified as a cultural identity marker in seventeenth and eighteenth century England. By the 1700s, the roast beef of old England had become famous throughout Europe. The British preferred their beef plain and simply roasted, and this was bound up with national identity in a fascinating way. Roast beef was seen as a symbol of English frugality, unfussiness, manly virility, and prosperity – a pointed contrast to foreign food dressed up with elaborate sauces. The French noticed, naturally, and coined the term “les Rosbifs” as a gentle jab at this very British obsession.

The French, for their part, pushed things even further toward the rare end. Their taxonomy of doneness runs from bleu (barely seared) through saignant (literally “bleeding”) to a point, which they consider the ideal middle ground but which most British or American diners would still call rare. The term a point is revealing in itself. It literally means “to the point” or “perfect,” which rather gives the game away: built into the very language is the assumption that medium rare is the correct state of affairs, and everything else is a deviation from perfection.

Why most of the world cooks meat through

The geographic split between rare-preferring and well-done cultures is not arbitrary. There are several interlocking reasons, and they rarely get discussed together.

The first is the question of which animals are being eaten and how they are raised. The European preference for rare meat is overwhelmingly a beef phenomenon, and to a lesser extent lamb. It developed in cultures where large, well-fed cattle were available and where the dominant cooking method for prestige meals was roasting whole joints over open fires or on spits. Northern European cultures had abundant grazing land and a tradition of raising large ruminants, giving them access to the big, tender cuts that lend themselves to quick, hot cooking.

In much of Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, the dominant meats have historically been goat, mutton from older sheep, and chicken – all leaner, tougher, and enormously improved by slow, thorough cooking. The culinary traditions of these regions developed around braising, stewing, and slow-roasting with aromatic spice pastes and liquid, precisely because the animals available demanded it. A goat leg from a free-ranging animal in Rajasthan or the Levant is a fundamentally different proposition from a well-marbled side of English beef. You would not want it rare. It would be chewy and unpleasant.

The second factor is climate and food safety. In hot climates without refrigeration, meat spoils quickly, and parasites and bacterial contamination are more dangerous. Cooking meat thoroughly was a practical survival strategy that became culturally embedded over millennia. The elaborate spice traditions of Indian, Middle Eastern, and North African cooking are not just about flavour. Many of those spices – turmeric, cumin, garlic, chilli – have genuine antimicrobial properties. The entire culinary grammar evolved around the assumption that meat would be cooked through.

The third is a structural difference in how meat features in the meal itself. In the European tradition, especially the British one, a large piece of meat is the centrepiece, carved at table, served in thick slices. The interior of the joint is the star, and its colour and texture become the focus of preference. In most Asian, Middle Eastern, and subcontinental cuisines, meat is cut into smaller pieces before cooking and incorporated into sauces, curries, stews, and rice dishes. It is a component of a larger composition, not a solo performer. When you are cooking meat in a complex curry with yoghurt, tomato, and a dozen spices for two hours, the question of whether the interior is pink is simply irrelevant. The entire cooking philosophy is different.

The inconvenient history of roast beef

There is a complication in the rare-steak-as-ancient-tradition narrative, and it is a significant one. For most of European history, cattle were far too valuable to raise just for eating.

Medieval cattle were primarily oxen used as draught animals to pull ploughs, and cows provided milk, cheese, and whey. Zooarchaeological evidence tells us that among cattle remains from medieval and early modern sites, the overwhelming majority were adults. These animals were being kept alive for work and dairy and only slaughtered at the end of their productive lives.

The deliberate breeding of cattle specifically for beef is astonishingly recent. Robert Bakewell was the first to breed cattle primarily for meat, and this was in the mid-eighteenth century, from around 1760 onwards. Before Bakewell, cattle were first and foremost kept for pulling ploughs or for dairy, with beef from surplus males as a secondary benefit. And the cattle of that era were nothing like what we eat today: extremely large-framed, late-maturing animals, flat-muscled, with finished steers weighing as much as 3,000 pounds when marketed at four to five years of age.

This creates a genuine paradox. The “roast beef of old England” that became a symbol of English identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was almost certainly not particularly good beef by modern standards. It was meat from old working animals or spent dairy cows – lean, tough, and fibrous from years of hauling ploughs through heavy clay soil. The idea that this meat was being served pink in the middle and celebrated as a national delicacy is, frankly, a bit hard to square with the likely reality.

If most beef before the late eighteenth century came from retired draught animals, you would think it would have been treated more like the goat and mutton of Asian and Middle Eastern cooking: slow-braised and stewed to break down all that tough connective tissue. And in fact, a great deal of medieval English meat cooking was exactly that – pottages, stews, pies, and long-braised dishes. The “roast” in roast beef referred to spit-roasting over an open fire, which for a tough old ox would have been a long, slow process by necessity, not the quick high-heat affair we associate with a modern medium-rare steak.

The preference for rare beef, in the way we understand it today, may only become truly viable after Bakewell and his successors created purpose-bred beef cattle that were young, well-marbled, and tender enough to eat pink. The whole rare-steak culture we think of as ancient and traditional may in reality be largely a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Europe’s quietly forgotten braising tradition

And this brings us to another thing that gets swept under the carpet in the modern rare-steak-as-sophistication narrative: the vast majority of the European meat cooking canon is braised, stewed, and slow-cooked food.

France has boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin, pot-au-feu, daube provencale, cassoulet, blanquette de veau, navarin d’agneau. These are not minor dishes in the repertoire. Pot-au-feu was considered the foundational dish of French home cooking for centuries. Italy has osso buco, bollito misto, brasato al Barolo, ragu that cook for hours. Germany has sauerbraten, which marinates for days and then braises for hours. Hungary has goulash. Belgium has carbonnade flamande. Ireland and Britain have their stews, their pies, their potted meats.

These are all dishes where the meat is cooked completely through, often for many hours, in liquid, until it is falling apart. And they are, by any honest reckoning, far more representative of what Europeans actually ate for most of history than a pink steak. The steak-frites or the Sunday roast carved pink at the table is the exception, the relatively modern prestige dish, not the everyday reality.

What is particularly telling is that even French haute cuisine, now so closely associated with rare meat, was built on a foundation of stocks, sauces, and braises. The entire mother sauce system, the fonds de cuisine that Careme and Escoffier codified – these all assume meat is being cooked slowly in liquid. The clear consomme, the demi-glace, the jus: they all come from hours and hours of gentle extraction from bones and tough cuts. The vast majority of classical French technique is about making tough, cheap, well-done meat taste extraordinary.

When “well done” became an insult

The stigma against well-done meat is, I think, a relatively recent phenomenon, probably emerging in its current virulent form during the mid-to-late twentieth century with the rise of American steakhouse culture and the professionalisation of food criticism. Before that, opinions were more varied. Early twentieth century cooking texts actually warned against rare meat, echoing their seventeenth century predecessors.

The shift happened through a confluence of factors: the post-war boom in American steakhouse dining, the influence of French haute cuisine on Western food culture with its built-in bias toward rare, the rise of food media and celebrity chefs who adopted rare and medium rare as a marker of sophistication, and the development of better refrigeration and food safety which made eating rare meat safer and therefore a viable mass preference rather than a risky one.

There is also a class dimension that is hard to ignore. Ordering rare became a signal of culinary knowledge and confidence, a way of distinguishing yourself from the unsophisticated masses. “Well done” became coded as the preference of people who did not know any better. This is a remarkably snobbish position when you consider it globally, since it effectively dismisses the culinary traditions of most of the world’s population.

The question of skill

And this brings me to what I think is the sharpest point in this whole discussion. Cooking meat well done and keeping it juicy is arguably a harder technical challenge than cooking it medium rare.

A medium-rare steak is relatively forgiving. You sear it, you pull it at the right temperature, and the internal fat and moisture do most of the work. But cooking meat all the way through while retaining succulence requires genuine understanding of technique: low-and-slow methods, the use of marinades and braising liquids, knowing when to rest meat, understanding carry-over cooking.

This is precisely what the great non-European meat traditions do extraordinarily well. A properly made rogan josh. A Yemeni mandi. An Egyptian fattah. A Chinese red-braised pork belly. These are dishes where the meat is cooked completely through and yet is falling-apart tender, deeply flavoured, and anything but dry. The “well done equals dry” equation only holds true if you are applying the European method of dry-heat cooking – grilling, roasting – and simply leaving the meat on too long. It is a failure of technique being treated as an inherent property of the doneness level.

The real irony is that the Western culinary world has been slowly rediscovering this. Low-and-slow barbecue, sous vide cooking, 24-hour braises: these are all methods of cooking meat well past medium rare while keeping it spectacularly tender and moist. They are essentially the same principles that Indian, Middle Eastern, and East Asian cooks have been using for centuries, repackaged with modern technology and different cultural framing.

The anomaly, not the standard

So to answer the question I started with: the world did not “start” eating rare meat so much as one particular culinary tradition, rooted in northern Europe’s specific agricultural conditions, animal breeds, and cooking methods, developed a preference for it and then, through colonial and cultural influence, managed to position that preference as the universally correct one. It is a classic case of a regional habit being elevated to a universal standard.

The traditions of cooking meat thoroughly – the way India, the Middle East, and much of Asia have done for millennia – were not just appropriate for the animals available in those regions. They were also how most of Europe cooked its beef for most of its history. The rare steak is the anomaly, the latecomer, the product of a very specific set of agricultural innovations in eighteenth century England that created an animal that had never existed before: one bred purely to be eaten young.

The Indian cook making a slow-braised nihari, the Moroccan cook building a tagine, the French grandmother assembling a daube – they are all working within a tradition that has far more in common with the historic European mainstream than the modern rare-steak orthodoxy does.

The irony is almost perfect.

Few dishes can claim to have been shaped by empires, carried along trade routes spanning thousands of miles, refined in royal kitchens, and then democratised on street corners — all while remaining essentially, recognisably itself. Biryani is one such dish. What arrives at the table as fragrant, layered rice and spiced meat is, in truth, a palimpsest of civilisations: Persian, Central Asian, Mughal, Deccani, and now global. Its history is contested, its origins claimed by many, and its variations so numerous that no two cities in South Asia can fully agree on what constitutes the real biryani. And that, perhaps, is precisely the point.

To understand biryani, one must first understand pilaf — for biryani did not emerge from nothing. It evolved, over centuries, from a family of rice and meat dishes that have been central to the culinary traditions of Persia, Central Asia, and the wider Islamic world.

Ancient roots: rice, meat, and the Persian tradition

The story begins with rice itself. While rice cultivation had spread from the Indian subcontinent to Central and Western Asia in antiquity, it was in Persia that the cooking of rice was elevated into a sophisticated culinary art. Persian cuisine developed an intricate vocabulary for rice preparation — polow (rice cooked in broth with separate grains, from which the word “pilaf” derives worldwide), chelow (plain steamed rice), kateh (sticky rice), and tahchin (slow-cooked layered rice) — reflecting a culture that took its rice very seriously indeed.

The earliest documented recipe for a pilaf-like preparation comes from the 10th-century Persian polymath Abu Ali Ibn Sina, better known in the West as Avicenna. In his medical texts, including sections of the Canon of Medicine, he described therapeutic rice dishes cooked in broth, elaborating on several types of pilaf and their nutritional properties. For this, the Tajiks still consider Ibn Sina the “father of modern pilaf.” His name for the dish was reportedly palov osh — said to be an acronym in Uzbek compiled from the basic ingredients: onion (piyoz), carrot (ayoz), meat (lakhm), fat (olio), salt (vet), water (ob), and rice (shali). Whether this etymology is folk tradition or historical fact is debatable, but it speaks to the deep cultural investment these peoples have in their rice.

Even before Avicenna, literary references to pilaf-like dishes appear in the histories of Alexander the Great. When Alexander captured the Sogdian capital of Marakanda — modern-day Samarkand — in 329 BCE, his soldiers reportedly encountered and were so taken with the local rice dishes that they carried the recipes back to Macedonia. These stories, while likely apocryphal according to historians like John Boardman, do testify to the antiquity and prestige of rice preparation in Central Asia.

By the time of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258 CE), methods of cooking rice that approximate modern pilaf had spread across a vast territory from the Iberian Peninsula to Afghanistan. The 13th-century Kitab al-Tabikh by Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi, compiled in Baghdad, describes rice cooked in broth to achieve separate grains, termed ruzz mufalfal — “rice like peppercorns” — preserving the Persian and Central Asian influences that flowed through the Abbasid courts. These texts describe a desired consistency where each grain should be plump, firm, and entirely separate, with no mushiness or clumping. The Spanish paella, the South Asian pulao, and biryani all evolved from this culinary tradition.

From pilaf to biryani: a distinction emerges

Here is where matters become interesting, and contested. The word “biryani” itself carries multiple Persian etymological threads. It may derive from birian or beriyan, meaning “to fry” or “to roast,” or from bereshtan, also meaning “to roast.” The usage traces to the phrase birinj biryan — literally “fried rice” — with birinj being the Persian word for rice. All roads lead back to Persia, linguistically at least.

But a name is not the same as an origin. Rice and meat preparations existed across the ancient world wherever these staple ingredients were available. The nomadic pastoral cultures of Central Asia relied heavily on both for sustenance, and a one-pot dish of rice with whatever meat was at hand would have been a practical and efficient meal for peoples on the move. The distinction between pulao and biryani, in fact, has never been entirely clear-cut. The British-era author Abdul Halim Sharar noted that biryani carried a stronger curried taste due to greater quantities of spices. The food historian Sohail Hashmi pointed out that pulao tends to be plainer, with meat or vegetables cooked together with rice, while biryani contains more gravy and is cooked longer. The cookery writer Pratibha Karan offered what is perhaps the clearest structural definition: biryani consists of two layers of rice with a layer of meat in the middle, while pulao is not layered.

This layering is crucial. It is the defining architectural principle of biryani — the separation and then reunion of components, each partially prepared independently before being brought together in a sealed vessel to complete their cooking through steam and aromatic exchange. This technique, known as dum pukht (literally “slow breathing oven” in Persian), distinguishes biryani from its simpler pilaf ancestors.

The Mughal synthesis: where biryani became biryani

The prevailing scholarly consensus, articulated most influentially by the food historian Lizzie Collingham, holds that the modern biryani developed in India in the royal kitchens of the Mughal Empire, specifically during the reign of Emperor Akbar (1556–1605). The Mughals, who traced their lineage to both Timur and Genghis Khan through their Persianised Turkic heritage, were great patrons of Persian culture. When they established their empire in the Indian subcontinent, they brought with them Persian court traditions, art, architecture, and — crucially — cuisine.

As Collingham describes it, in the Mughal court kitchens, “the delicately flavoured Persian pilau met the pungent and spicy rice dishes of Hindustan to create the classic Mughlai dish, biryani.” This was not a simple transplantation. It was a genuine synthesis: Persian slow-cooking methods and yoghurt-marinated meat combined with the assertive spice traditions of the subcontinent — garam masala, green chillies, turmeric, coriander, mint — to produce something neither purely Persian nor purely Indian, but distinctively Mughal.

The Portuguese Friar Sebastien Manrique, visiting the Mughal court in the 1630s, made a clear distinction between Persian pilau and Mughal biryani, describing grand feasts featuring “the rich and aromatic Mogol Bringes [biryanis] and Persian pilaos of different hues.” The Ain-i-Akbari, the detailed administrative chronicle of Akbar’s court written by his historian Abu’l Fazl in 1590, records multiple rice dishes including palaos, biryanis, and shulla, though it draws little formal distinction between them — suggesting that the taxonomy was still fluid in Akbar’s time.

The emperor Aurangzeb, writing to his son, mentions biryani with evident fondness: “I remember the savour of your khichidi and biryani during the winter. Truly the kabuli cooked by Islam Khan does not surpass them.” He requested that a skilled biryani cook be sent to him — a telling detail about the status the dish held in imperial circles.

The legend of Mumtaz Mahal — that Shah Jahan’s queen, visiting army barracks and finding soldiers malnourished, ordered the royal chefs to create a nourishing one-pot rice and meat dish — is almost certainly apocryphal. But like many food origin stories, it speaks to a truth about the dish’s character: biryani was always simultaneously courtly and martial, elaborate and practical, a meal fit for a banquet and for an army camp.

Across the subcontinent: the great diversification

The genius of biryani lies not in any single definitive recipe but in its capacity for regional adaptation. As the Mughal Empire expanded and then fragmented, biryani travelled with governors, soldiers, pilgrims, and displaced courts, absorbing local flavours and techniques at every stop.

Hyderabadi biryani

When the Mughals conquered Hyderabad in the 1630s, the dish entered the Deccan. Under the Nizams, who ruled Hyderabad from 1724 until Indian independence in 1948, biryani was refined with an almost obsessive dedication. The Nizams’ kitchens are said to have developed nearly fifty varieties, using proteins ranging from goat and chicken to fish, prawns, quail, and deer. The signature Hyderabadi method is the kacchi (raw) biryani — raw meat marinated overnight in yoghurt and spices, layered with partially cooked rice, sealed with dough, and slow-cooked on dum. The result is bold, spicy, and intensely flavoured, with the meat juices infusing every grain of rice. When the Mughal Empire declined in Delhi after 1857, Hyderabad emerged as a major centre of South Asian Muslim culture, and its biryani became arguably the most famous iteration of the dish.

Lucknowi (Awadhi) biryani

In Lucknow, the capital of the Awadh region, biryani took on a markedly different character under the Nawabs. Where Hyderabadi biryani is bold and assertive, Lucknowi biryani is subtle and fragrant. The distinguishing technique is the pakki (cooked) method: meat and rice are prepared separately — the meat in a yoghurt and milk-based stock, the rice parboiled with whole spices — before being layered in a copper vessel and finished on dum. The spicing is gentler, with an emphasis on saffron, star anise, kewra (screwpine water), and rose water. The Nawabs of Awadh, renowned for their luxurious taste, approached food as an art form, and Lucknowi biryani reflects that sensibility — restrained, aromatic, and refined.

Kolkata biryani

When the British deposed Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh in 1856 and exiled him to Calcutta, he brought his court — and his cooks — with him. The Lucknowi biryani tradition thus migrated eastward, but in its new home it underwent a distinctive transformation. The most notable innovation was the addition of the potato — large golden chunks of it, cooked within the biryani. Whether this was born of economy (stretching the expensive meat further under reduced royal finances) or of culinary adventurism (the potato was still a relatively exotic ingredient in mid-19th century India) remains debated. Begum Manzilat Fatima, the Nawab’s great-great-granddaughter, favoured the latter theory — potatoes were expensive and unusual in 1856, making their inclusion a mark of sophistication rather than poverty. Regardless, the boiled egg and the potato became the signatures of Kolkata biryani, along with a lighter spice profile and a subtle sweetness from kewra essence.

Southern and coastal variations

Biryani’s journey was not exclusively a northern affair. Some food historians, notably Salma Hussein, have argued that biryani may have arrived in South India’s Deccan region before the Mughal era, brought by Arab traders and travelling soldier-statesmen. The ancient Tamil literary tradition records a dish called Oon Soru — rice cooked in ghee with meat, turmeric, coriander, pepper, and bay leaf — from the Chola Dynasty period, as early as the 2nd to 3rd century CE. Whether this was a direct precursor to biryani or merely a parallel development is an open question, but it complicates any simple narrative of biryani as a purely Persian or Mughal import.

Kerala’s Malabar coast developed its own tradition, using the short-grained Jeerakasala (cumin rice) rather than basmati, cooked with seafood, chicken, or mutton and infused with coconut and curry leaves. In Tamil Nadu, Ambur biryani is distinguished by dried chilli paste, whole spices, and a dum-style cooking method using coconut milk. Dindigul biryani uses the local seeraga samba rice and is tangier than its northern cousins, with generous amounts of curd and lemon. Each coastal and southern variation tells the story of biryani meeting local ecology, local palates, and local identities.

Beyond the subcontinent: a global migration

Biryani’s reach extends far beyond South Asia, carried by diaspora communities, trade routes, and the simple force of its appeal.

In the Persian Gulf states — Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and the UAE — biryani is a staple, often saffron-based with chicken, reflecting the dish’s deep roots in the wider Islamic culinary world. Oman’s maqbous uses dried lime, saffron, and smoking charcoal for a distinctive aromatic character. In Southeast Asia, biryani adapted to local ingredients and traditions: Myanmar’s danpauk, derived from the Persian dum pukht, is a mainstay at weddings and festive events. In Malaysia and Singapore, biryani is served with local spice blends and accompaniments. Indonesia’s nasi kebuli is a spicy steamed rice dish cooked in goat broth, milk, and ghee. Thailand’s khao mhok uses chicken, beef, or fish, topped with fried garlic and served with a green sour sauce.

The 19th-century movement of Indian indentured labourers to the Caribbean, East Africa, and beyond carried biryani to yet more kitchens. In Trinidad and Tobago, in Kenya, in South Africa’s Cape Malay community — wherever South Asian populations settled, biryani settled with them, adapting and evolving, absorbing new ingredients and new meanings.

The modern biryani: a democratic feast

Today, biryani occupies a unique position in the culinary world. In India, it is the single most ordered dish on food delivery platforms — a remarkable achievement for a preparation that was, for centuries, the province of royal kitchens and master chefs. According to Swiggy, India’s largest food delivery service, biryani tops their annual food trends year after year, with hundreds of thousands of new users placing their first orders for chicken biryani. World Biryani Day is celebrated on 7th July.

The dish has proven extraordinarily adaptable to modern life. Vegetarian versions — tahiri made with potatoes and peas, or paneer and mixed vegetables — cater to India’s large vegetarian population. Health-conscious variations substitute quinoa or brown rice. Fusion biryanis experiment with international flavours. Ready-to-eat biryani kits and meal delivery services have made the dish accessible far beyond the traditional centres of biryani mastery. And yet, the classic preparations endure: in Hyderabad, Lucknow, Kolkata, Chennai, and Karachi, biryani restaurants with decades or even centuries of tradition continue to serve dishes made by methods that would be recognisable to a Mughal court chef.

As the food historian Mohsina Mukadam has observed, while biryani may not have originated in India, “with its spices and flavours, it is a completely Indian innovation.” This seems right, but also perhaps too narrow. Biryani is Persian in its ancestry, Central Asian in its heartiness, Mughal in its refinement, Indian in its spicing, and now global in its reach. It belongs, in the end, to everyone who cooks it and everyone who eats it.

What makes biryani endure is not any single recipe but the principle at its core — that separate ingredients, each prepared with care and attention, can be brought together in a sealed vessel and, through the slow alchemy of steam and heat, transformed into something greater than the sum of their parts. That is a metaphor, if you want one, for the civilisational exchange that produced the dish in the first place. But it is also, more simply, the reason it tastes so extraordinarily good.

Sources consulted include Lizzie Collingham’s work on Indian food history, K.T. Achaya’s A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, Pratibha Karan’s Biryani, Colleen Taylor Sen’s Feasts and Fasts, the Ain-i-Akbari of Abu’l Fazl, the Kitab al-Tabikh of al-Baghdadi, and accounts from the Google Arts & Culture project on the origins of biryani.

The Silver Spoon is considered the encyclopaedia of Italian food, and obviously I have a copy. This recipe is inspired by a “Grandmother’s stew” among its pages.

A caponata is a traditional eggplant dish from Sicily. The recipe here is my variation, staying true to the spirit of Italian cooking with a little bit of a personal twist.

It’s a simple recipe, and makes a nice vegetarian main, best served with a nice crusty bread to soak it up. It can even act as a side to any roast meat or chicken.

Ingredients

• 500 g eggplant (the long purple ones, or small ones; not the big round ones)
• 1 large capsicum (80 g)
• 1 small onion, chopped (about ½ cup)
• 1 large red chilli pepper, seeds and all (not a very hot variety)
• A scant ½ cup of sliced green olives
• 1 teaspoon of chopped capers
• 4 largish cloves of garlic, crushed and minced
• 1 small can of tomato paste
• A couple of sprigs of fresh oregano or thyme
• Salt and black pepper to taste
• Olive oil

Method

1. Dice the eggplant and put it in a sieve.
2. Salt the eggplant liberally and put a little weight on it to squeeze out some of the water.
3. Meanwhile, roast the capsicum over an open flame on all sides, then remove it and dunk it in cold water. You should then be able to peel off the skin. Remove the seeds and chop it into a big dice, similar in size to the eggplant.
4. Heat a pan and, when hot, add a splash of olive oil.
5. Brown the eggplant on all sides in the oil, then remove it from the pan and set aside.
6. In the same pan, add the onions and soften them over a low heat. We are not caramelising them, just softening them to remove the sharpness, so cook until they go translucent.
7. Still on a low heat, add the garlic and let it soften. Again, don’t brown it; we just want to take away the sharpness.
8. Add the thyme or oregano and the remaining ingredients except the tomato paste (eggplant, capsicum, chilli, olives and capers). If using dried oregano, don’t add it until the tomato paste goes in.
9. Mix everything together and let it cook.
10. Add the tomato paste and a scant splash of hot water. There should not be any sauce, just enough to coat the eggplant.
11. Cook for about 4–5 minutes. You are looking for the eggplant to keep its shape, but collapse with slight pressure from a fork.
12. Remove the stalks of oregano or thyme.
13. Check the seasoning and add salt and pepper. Don’t add any salt before this stage, as a lot of the ingredients are salty: the salted eggplant, the capers and the olives.
14. The oil will be released as well. Remove from the heat.
15. Serve with crusty bread or over a short pasta.

Tips

1. This is one dish where I don’t recommend salting and seasoning as you go. The olives and capers have their own salt and will release it.
2. Like most braises, stews and curries, this will be better the next day.

Eat in good health!

It’s a simple recipe, and makes a nice main, best served with an Indian bread like a roti or a simple paratha. Because it is a thick sauce, I don’t recommend it with rice.

Sorry, no image. We ate it all before the photos. 😋

Ingredients

• 1.25 kg chicken pieces (breast, leg, thigh), on the bone recommended
• 2½ tablespoons of whole black peppercorns (yes, it sounds like a lot, but it will be tempered by the other ingredients)
• 200 g Greek yoghurt, whipped
• 200 g sliced onions
• 2 bay leaves
• 4 cloves
• 1 tablespoon of garlic paste
• ½ tablespoon of ginger paste
• Salt to taste
• 2–3 tablespoons of oil

Method

1. Grind the black pepper in a spice grinder or with a mortar and pestle. You need a coarse grind.
2. Marinate the chicken in half the ground black pepper, 1 tbsp of oil, the ginger and garlic pastes, and 1 tsp of salt.
3. Allow the chicken to marinate for at least half an hour. If rushed, you can cook the chicken straight away, but marinating is always better.
4. In a thick-bottomed pan, heat the remaining oil and add the bay leaves and the cloves.
5. When they become aromatic and release their smell, reduce the heat to low and add the onions.
6. We need to soften the onions, not brown them. This gentle cooking removes their pungency.
7. Once the onions are soft and translucent, remove them from the heat and pick out the bay leaves and the cloves.
8. Grind the softened onions into a purée, adding a little water if necessary to get a smooth paste.
9. Meanwhile, brown the marinated chicken pieces in the pan, then set them aside.
10. Return the pan to high heat and add back the onion purée, the bay leaves and the cloves.
11. Return the chicken to the onion purée in the pan, and stir to mix everything together.
12. Add the remaining black pepper, reserving a large pinch for garnish.
13. Reduce the heat to low, whip the yoghurt and add it, stirring to mix everything together well.
14. Add up to ½ cup of warm or hot water to help blend everything together. Season with salt at this point.
15. Cook for about 30–40 minutes, depending on the size of the chicken pieces. Check the seasoning again.
16. You should have a thick curry coating the chicken.
17. Serve hot, garnished with the reserved black pepper.

Tips

1. Always add dairy on low heat to stop it scorching and splitting.
2. Use ghee instead of oil for cooking the onions, to give an interesting depth to the base.
3. Like most braises, stews and curries, this will be better the next day.

Eat in good health!

The lasagna has two layers: mixed vegetables in a tomato sauce at the base, and a cheesy spinach and mushroom layer above. It’s all topped off with some more cheese for a nice crust.

It’s a simple recipe, but takes a little bit of work. The reward is well worth it.

Ingredients

Based on a 2.5 litre baking dish.

• 12 standard size lasagna sheets. I use the variety that does not need to be pre-boiled.
• 1 medium green capsicum
• 1 medium yellow capsicum
• 1 medium zucchini or 1 medium eggplant
• 200 g cherry tomatoes, or similar tomatoes, deseeded and chopped
• 200 g tomato paste
• 200 g mushrooms
• 800 g spinach leaves
• 3–4 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 2 tablespoons of cream
• Fresh basil, oregano or thyme, or dried oregano or thyme
• Red chilli flakes to your liking
• 200 g fresh mozzarella
• 50–60 g parmesan, or any cheese you prefer, for the top
• Freshly cracked black pepper
• Salt to taste

Method

Tomato and vegetable sauce

1. Chop the capsicum, zucchini, eggplant and mushrooms into a 1" dice.
2. If using eggplant, once you have chopped it, rub a little salt into it and let it drain in a colander. This helps remove some of its bitterness. Leave it for 10 minutes and then give it a quick rinse.
3. Heat some olive oil and add the cherry tomatoes. Let them heat up until they soften and start bursting with a little pressure, gently break down about half of the tomatoes, and add the vegetables you are using.
4. Mix them through and add the tomato paste, basil and other herbs.
5. Season with salt and add red chilli flakes to your desired level of heat.
6. The vegetables should only just start to soften, no more: we want a chunky sauce.

Spinach and mushroom sauce

1. Prepare the spinach by blanching it in hot water for 4 minutes, then removing it and plunging it into ice water.
2. Drain the spinach and squeeze all the water out of it. You will probably end up with a ball of about 200 g.
3. Heat a little oil in a skillet and add the garlic. Once it is fragrant, add the mushrooms and let them brown a bit. Add the spinach and mix everything together. Season with salt and pepper.
4. Turn off the heat, add the cream to the spinach and mix it through.

Build the layers

1. Put a little of the liquid from the tomato sauce in the base of the baking dish and spread it around.
2. Put 3 lasagna sheets on top of the sauce, trying to cover the whole of the dish.
3. Put the vegetable and tomato sauce on top of the lasagna sheets. Avoid adding too much liquid and try to keep the sauce chunky. Reserve some of the sauce to dress the top of the lasagna.
4. Cover the tomato sauce with more lasagna sheets.
5. The next layer is the spinach and mushroom. Cover the lasagna sheets completely.
6. Put the fresh mozzarella on top of the spinach and mushroom layer.
7. I usually tear the mozzarella into chunks and spread them around the spinach. You don’t want a complete layer of cheese, just cheese studded throughout.
8. Once the cheese is on, put on the last layer of lasagna sheets.
9. Lightly dress the last layer of sheets with the remaining tomato sauce. You are not going to cover it completely; in fact, you want some of the sheet showing.
10. Grate the parmesan finely and spread it over the tomato sauce and the pasta sheets. Again, you don’t want a complete layer of cheese, just a scattering.
11. Let the lasagna sit for 10 minutes to settle, and it’s ready for baking.

Baking

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C.
2. Lightly cover the baking dish with foil, so that it is not touching the cheese.
3. Place the dish on the middle shelf and bake for 30 minutes.
4. Remove the foil and bake for another 10 minutes to brown the cheese.
5. Remove the dish from the oven and let it rest for 10 minutes. This lets the liquids settle, and the lasagna will be easier to cut and serve.
6. Use a wide spatula and a knife to cut the lasagna into squares, and serve.

Tips

1. Use any vegetables you have or like. Even potato works well.
2. To turn this into a meat lasagna, add meat to the tomato sauce instead of the vegetables.
3. A traditional lasagna uses a béchamel sauce, made from a roux (flour cooked in butter) and milk. I like the mozzarella more.

Eat in good health!

Ingredients

• 400 g squid, cut into rings, or frozen squid rings (it’s quite forgiving)
• 1 level teaspoon of turmeric
• 2½ teaspoons of mustard seeds
• About 3 stems of curry leaves, about 30 leaves
• 3 dried red chillies
• Optional: a teaspoon of roasted chana dal or some salted peanuts

Method

1. This dish cooks quickly, so have everything ready to go.
2. Toss the squid in the turmeric and leave it for about 2–3 minutes.
3. Heat a couple of teaspoons of vegetable or peanut oil.
4. Once the oil is hot (but not smoking), add the mustard seeds and the red chillies.
5. Once the mustard seeds start popping, throw in the curry leaves, and the chana dal or peanuts if using.
6. Immediately follow with the squid, and toss it so that it is coated with the mustard seeds and the curry leaves.
7. Cook for about 3–5 minutes, until the squid is done.
8. Remove and serve hot, with a squeeze of lemon.

Tips

Squid needs to be cooked either really quickly or for a really long time. When it is ready, it will be an opaque milky white inside, and when you bite it, it will have a little resistance.

Eat in good health!

Ingredients

• 3 kg leg of pork (I used a deboned one, which was 2.5 kg)
• About a tablespoon of fine sea salt
• About a tablespoon, and a pinch more, of freshly ground black pepper
• ⅓ tablespoon of a flavourless high-heat cooking oil: vegetable, peanut or canola

Method

1. This is a slow-cooked leg, so set some time aside for it on the day you want to eat it. The slow cooking gives you tender meat, and then a burst of high heat at the end gives you the crackling.
2. The crackling depends on the moisture in the skin flashing to steam in a burst of high heat.
3. Dry the pork thoroughly, so there’s no surface moisture.
4. Score the fat lightly. I didn’t go too deep, because I wanted this puffed type of crackling. If you score deeply, you will get crispy strips.
5. Rub all over with the salt and the pepper, especially salting the skin.
6. Set the oven to 125°C.
7. Place the pork on the middle shelf, on a rack, with a tray underneath for the drippings.
8. Cook for about 5 hours, checking every hour and turning the leg around every couple of hours.
9. You should check for doneness regularly. The safe internal temperature is about 70°C, and checking regularly ensures it does not dry out.
10. At about the 5 hour mark, pull it out, tent it in foil and let it rest. You will cook it for another 25 minutes or so to get the crackling going.
11. An hour before you are ready to eat, crank your oven up to 250°C.
12. Rub some oil over the crackling. Use an oil that can take a high temperature: I don’t recommend olive oil, but peanut, canola or vegetable are all good.
13. Put the leg back in and let the crackling form, checking every 10 minutes. You can cover the meat with foil, leaving only the crackling exposed, to stop the meat drying out or charring (charred bits are good though, IMHO).
14. Pull it out once you are satisfied, and let it rest for about 15 minutes before carving.

To serve

I served this with fresh nuoc cham, a chimichurri, a Korean barbecue sauce and a basil and chilli sambal. We made lettuce wraps with spring onions, capsicum, green chillies and more. But you could also make a pan gravy or a similar sauce to enjoy it with.

Eat in good health!

Ingredients

For the chicken

• 350–400 g boneless chicken thigh fillets. You can use breast meat as well.

For the marinade

• 6 garlic cloves
• ½" knob of ginger
• 3 green chillies (seeds and all)
• 100 g coriander (leaves and stems)
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 3–4 teaspoons of water
• Salt to taste

For the breading

• 2 cups of breadcrumbs
• 4 eggs
• ¼ cup of plain flour
• Salt to taste

Method

Marinate and crumb

1. Prepare the marinade: grind all the marinade ingredients (except the water) in a liquidiser or a spice grinding jar.
2. The marinade should be a thick paste, so only use some of the water to help the ingredients grind.
3. Once done, it should be a bright, vibrant green.
4. Coat all the fillets with the marinade. You want a generous layer across the fillets, not thick, but with complete coverage.
5. Rest the fillets, covered, in the fridge for at least 3 hours. I suggest using a glass or similar non-reactive container.
6. To prepare the breading, season the breadcrumbs and the plain flour with a little salt.
7. Beat the eggs so they are a thick liquid, but not frothy.
8. Remove the chicken from the fridge.
9. Dip it in the flour and lightly dust all sides. The chicken should be damp enough from the marinade for the flour to stick to it.
10. Dip the chicken in the egg and then in the crumbs.
11. Dip the chicken in the egg again and crumb it a second time. This gives you a thick enough layer to protect the chicken and get nice and crispy.
12. Let the crumbed chicken rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes before you start frying. It can rest for up to 4 hours. If resting any longer than 30 minutes, pull it out 10 minutes before you start cooking.

Frying

1. Use a skillet large enough to cook 2 fillets at a time with about an inch and a half of space around each fillet.
2. The chicken should be shallow fried, so use enough oil to come halfway up the thickness of the fillets.
3. Heat the oil on medium heat until a cube of bread dropped in starts gently bubbling.
4. Put in the fillets and cook until one side is golden, then flip them over and cook the other side to the same colour.
5. Pull them out and let them rest on absorbent paper.
6. Cook the other fillets in the same way.
7. Serve hot.

To serve

I would serve this with kasundi: strong and pungent, it looks like a bright yellow, liquid seeded mustard.

But this chicken holds up well with ketchup or mayonnaise, and I also recommend trying it with tzatziki.

Tips

1. If you want a lighter breading, don’t double dip, but stick a few more crumbs on in the first round.
2. Don’t let the oil get too hot, or the crumbs will burn before the chicken is cooked.

Eat in good health!

Ingredients

For the fish

• 350–400 g white fish fillets. Bhetki (sea bass / barramundi) is a popular option, but any firm white fish would work. See the image below for a cut reference. The fillets are about ½" thick.

For the marinade

• 6 garlic cloves
• ½" knob of ginger
• 3 green chillies (seeds and all)
• 100 g coriander (leaves and stems)
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 3–4 teaspoons of water
• Salt to taste

For the breading

• 2 cups of breadcrumbs
• 4 eggs
• ¼ cup of plain flour
• Salt to taste

Method

Marinate and crumb

1. Prepare the marinade: grind all the marinade ingredients (except the water) in a liquidiser or a spice grinding jar.
2. The marinade should be a thick paste, so only use some of the water to help the ingredients grind.
3. Once done, it should be a bright, vibrant green.
4. Coat all the fillets with the marinade. You want a generous layer across the fillets, not thick, but with complete coverage.
5. Rest the fillets, covered, in the fridge for 2–3 hours. I suggest using a glass or similar non-reactive container.
6. To prepare the breading, season the breadcrumbs and the plain flour with a little salt.
7. Beat the eggs so they are a thick liquid, but not frothy.
8. Remove the fish from the fridge.
9. Dip it in the flour and lightly dust all sides. The fish should be damp enough from the marinade for the flour to stick to it.
10. Dip the fish in the egg and then in the crumbs.
11. Dip the fish in the egg again and crumb it a second time. This gives you a thick enough layer to protect the fish and get nice and crispy.
12. Let the crumbed fish rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes before you start frying. It can rest for up to 4 hours. If resting any longer than 30 minutes, pull it out 10 minutes before you start cooking.

Frying

1. Use a skillet large enough to cook 2 fillets at a time with about an inch and a half of space around each fillet.
2. The fish will be shallow fried, so use enough oil to come halfway up the thickness of the fillets.
3. Heat the oil on medium heat until a cube of bread dropped in starts gently bubbling.
4. Put in the fish fillets and cook until one side is golden, then flip them over and cook the other side to the same colour.
5. Pull them out and let them rest on absorbent paper.
6. Cook the other fillets in the same way.
7. Serve hot.

To serve

Traditionally this is served with kasundi: strong and pungent, it looks like a bright yellow, liquid seeded mustard. If you cannot get your hands on kasundi, mix Dijon and seeded mustard to get the consistency. Or try it with hot English mustard.

Alternatively, if you have some mustard powder, just mix a teaspoon with a couple of teaspoons of water.

Tips

1. If you want a lighter breading, don’t double dip, but stick a few more crumbs on in the first round.
2. If your fish fillets smell slightly fishy, let them rest in a bowl of water with a teaspoon of plain vinegar for 10 minutes before marinating.
3. Don’t let the oil get too hot, or the crumbs will burn before the fish is cooked.

Eat in good health!