Bangladeshi Baburchi

At the risk of sounding like a complete wuss, until today, I had yet to cook any meat in Bangladesh. Instead, I’ve happily existed on a diet of vegetables, pulses, rice, noodles and the occasional deep fried bread (okay, it’s not occasional, it’s more like a habit). Don’t get me wrong, I’m no vegetarian – I’ll eat meat that others have cooked for me with relish – but the idea of going to the slaughter house and actually purchasing the meat has always seemed like one challenge too many.

Picture it: a tin roofed shed, seemingly designed to ensure that the interior temperature is significantly higher than that outside. Enormous hunks of cow, strung up from the rafters, always a strange purple colour and invariably dotted with fat flies. It’s such a far cry from Sainsbury’s convenient polystyrene packed ‘steak’, or Marks and Spencer’s’ individually wrapped chicken breasts, that I – with my sheltered English life – don’t have the first clue where to begin. I don’t even know the names for the different parts of a cow, for instance. Pathetically inexcusable, yes, although I hope for others who have always bought their meat clinically separated from the animal of origin, understandable. It’s not that I’m particularly squeamish about the thought of my dinner coming from a once living and breathing animal. The only reason for vegetarianism that I’ve ever found seriously convincing is the environmental impact argument. It’s just that the whole business of buying, cooking and keeping meat has always felt a bit too much here. You might call it sheer laziness, in fact.

I have, however, managed to overcome this hurdle today. Not by seizing the bull by the horns (literally), and marching down to the slaughter house to buy me some beef. Oh no. Rather, I’ve totally dodged my underlying issues and taken my landlady up on her kind offer to buy my meat for me.

So today I had my first experience of cooking beef in the Bangladeshi style. And it’s amazingly simple! The beef comes ready chopped, so all you do is give it a good wash, bung it in a pan with a load of herbs and spices, a sickening amount of oil and salt, add some water and boil it for about half an hour. Then, hey presto, you’re done. Easy.

The only slight drawback is that I think my landlady was rather optimistic about how much meat I can consume, and – rather worryingly – I now have a kilogram of beef curry to consume before it goes off.

So please excuse me while I go back to gorging myself on red meat. There’s no time to lose.