Main course

The dishes a meal is built around: braises and curries, roasts and grills, stir-fries, rice dishes and dumplings. In many of them, much of the flavour is made at the surface of the meat or vegetables, before any liquid goes in. Basics to read first: Browning and the Maillard Reaction

🇹🇭Thai

Phat Phrik Khing (Dry-Fried Curry with Pork and Long Beans)

A dry Thai curry: the paste is fried in oil, then pork and yardlong beans are stir-fried in it with no liquid added. With no coconut milk poured in it is far drier than red curry, and the paste clings straight to the meat and beans. The "khing" in the name means ginger, though there is no ginger in it.

🇵🇹Portuguese

Cabidela (Chicken and Rice Finished with Vinegared Blood)

A dish from the Minho in northern Portugal: chicken and rice simmered in broth and finished, almost at the end, with the bird's blood mixed with vinegar. The vinegar goes into the blood as it is collected, to stop it clotting. The blood turns the broth brown and thickens it, and the vinegar leaves a quiet sourness.

🇵🇪Peruvian

Tacu-Tacu (Pan-Fried Rice and Bean Cake)

A Peruvian dish of leftover rice and cooked beans fried together and shaped into a flat oval. Part of the beans is mashed into the rice so that it holds as one cake, and the pan gives it a crisp outer crust. It is topped with a fried egg or a thin steak and served with fried plantain.

🇹🇷Turkish

İskilip Dolması (Rice Steamed in a Cloth Bag over Lamb Broth)

Rice from İskilip in Çorum, Turkey: fried in animal fat with onion, tied into a cloth bag and set on a trivet inside a pot of simmering lamb broth, where it cooks overnight in the steam alone. The rice never touches the liquid. To serve, the meat goes on top and the broth is poured over. A registered geographical indication and a wedding dish.

🇧🇷Brazilian

Carne de Sol (Lightly Salted, Air-Dried Beef)

Beef from northeastern Brazil, cut into thick slabs, salted lightly and dried briefly under cover where the air moves. The name means "sun meat", but it is kept out of the sun. Only the outside dries; the inside stays moist, so it goes straight to the grill or the pan without soaking.

🇮🇩Indonesian

Sate Klatak (Goat Satay on Iron Skewers)

Goat satay from Pleret in Bantul, Yogyakarta: the meat goes on iron skewers instead of bamboo, over charcoal, seasoned with nothing but salt and a pinch of pepper. The iron carries heat into the meat, so it cooks from the inside as well. Served with gulai, a spiced curry broth.

🇵🇭Filipino

Inun-unan (Visayan Fish Simmered in Vinegar and Ginger)

A Visayan fish dish from the Philippines: whole fish in a pot with ginger, onion and garlic, covered with vinegar and almost no water, and simmered. No vegetables go in. It is sometimes called "boiled pickled fish" in English.

🇪🇸Spanish

Calamares en su Tinta (Squid Stewed in Its Own Ink)

A Spanish stew of squid, body and tentacles, simmered gently in a long-cooked onion and pepper sofrito with white wine for about 45 minutes, then finished with its own ink into a black sauce. Served with white rice. Squid is tender cooked very briefly or very long, and this is the long way.

🇮🇩Indonesian

Arsik (Batak Carp Cooked Dry with Andaliman)

A Batak carp dish from North Sumatra: a whole carp, scales left on, is rubbed with a paste of turmeric, andaliman and torch ginger fruit and cooked over low heat in a little oil and water, basted with the liquid until the pan is nearly dry. The Batak name means fish cooked until dry. It is served whole at weddings and other feasts.

🇲🇦Moroccan

Tanjia (Meat Sealed in a Clay Jar with Preserved Lemon)

A meat dish from Marrakech: beef or lamb packed into a tall clay jar with preserved lemon, cumin, saffron and garlic, the mouth sealed with paper, and left for four hours or more in the hot ashes of the furnace that heats a public bathhouse. Almost no water goes in.

🇮🇹Italian

Risi e Bisi (Rice and Peas Cooked in Pea-Pod Broth)

A Venetian spring rice dish. Peas bought in the pod are shelled, the pods boiled and strained into a broth, and that broth cooks vialone nano rice with the peas. It is looser than a risotto and thicker than a soup, eaten with a spoon.

🇫🇷French

Quenelle de Brochet (Pike Dumplings Baked in Crayfish Sauce)

The pike quenelle of Lyon and the Dombes: a paste of flour cooked in water and dried out in the pan, worked with fish and egg, shaped into long dumplings, poached, then baked under a crayfish sauce (sauce Nantua) until it doubles in size.

🇲🇽Mexican

Papadzules (Egg Tortillas in Pumpkin-Seed Sauce)

A Yucatán tortilla dish: tortillas dipped in a green sauce of toasted ground pumpkin seeds and epazote broth, rolled round chopped hard-boiled egg and covered with more sauce and a habanero tomato sauce. The oil squeezed by hand out of the ground seeds goes on last.

🇱🇰Sri Lankan

Lamprais (Stock Rice and Curries Baked in Banana Leaf)

A banana-leaf parcel from Sri Lanka's Dutch Burgher community: rice fried in butter and cooked in meat stock, with a meat curry, an aubergine and plantain curry, meatballs and an onion sambol, each made separately, wrapped in one leaf and baked.

🇷🇺Russian

Kulebyaka (Layered Salmon and Rice Pie)

Russia's great fish pie: salmon, rice, mushrooms, boiled egg and dill stacked in layers and baked in a pastry case, with a thin pancake laid between one layer and the next so the fillings do not mix. Escoffier brought it to France in the early twentieth century.

🇯🇵Japanese

Ebi Fry (Straightened Panko-Fried Prawns)

The Japanese yoshoku fried prawn: peeled prawns scored on the belly and pressed straight, coated in flour, egg and panko and deep-fried, served with tartare sauce and shredded cabbage.

🇻🇳Vietnamese

Com Tam (Broken Rice with Grilled Pork Chop)

Saigon broken rice: grains that cracked in milling, cooked so they stay separate, topped with a lemongrass-marinated grilled pork chop, scallion oil and pickled daikon and carrot, with sweet-sour fish sauce poured over the plate.

🇬🇪Georgian

Chakapuli (Lamb Stewed with Tarragon and Green Plums)

Georgian lamb stew: lamb cooked in white wine, with unripe cherry plums and whole bunches of tarragon added at the end. Those two ingredients exist only from spring into early summer, so that is when it is made, and it often appears at Easter.

🇻🇳Vietnamese

Bo La Lot (Beef Rolled in Wild Betel Leaves and Grilled)

A southern Vietnamese grill: seasoned minced beef rolled finger-thick in lá lốt (wild betel leaf), grilled over charcoal, scattered with crushed peanuts and spring-onion oil, and eaten wrapped with rice noodles, rice paper and herbs. The leaf is not peeled off; it is eaten with the meat.

🇮🇹Italian

Arrosticini (Abruzzo Mutton Skewers)

Mutton skewers from Abruzzo: 1cm cubes of mutton threaded on thin wooden sticks, laid across a long, narrow, trough-shaped grill and seasoned with nothing but salt. The grill gathers its heat under the meat and leaves both ends of each skewer outside it, so the sticks do not burn and you eat them straight from the hand.

🇰🇷Korean

Tarak-juk (Milk and Ground Rice Porridge)

A Korean court porridge: soaked rice ground to a fine slurry, cooked until it thickens, then loosened with milk added in stages and given a few minutes more. The milk is the dish and the rice is what thickens it, so the rice is ground and the whole pot is done in minutes. A pinch of salt in the pot, honey at the table.

🇯🇵Japanese

Sekihan (Glutinous Rice Steamed with Red Beans)

Japan's celebration rice: glutinous rice soaked overnight in the water the azuki were cooked in, so it takes their colour, then steamed with the beans. The beans go in unsoaked, because the longer azuki soak the more of them split as they cook. Eaten with sesame salt.

🇮🇹Italian

Ragù Napoletano (Tomato Sauce Slow-Cooked Around Whole Cuts of Meat)

Naples' Sunday sauce: beef and pork left in large pieces, browned with onion, then cooked in tomato passata at the barest simmer for three hours or more. The sauce dresses the pasta as the first course and the meat comes out of the pot as the second.

🇯🇵Japanese

Kiritanpo (Grilled Rice Tubes Simmered in Chicken Hotpot)

An Akita hotpot: cooked rice pounded until about half the grains are broken, pressed onto skewers as tubes and grilled, then simmered briefly in chicken broth with chicken, burdock, maitake and Japanese parsley.

🇯🇵Japanese

Kakinoha-zushi (Salted Mackerel Sushi Pressed in Persimmon Leaves)

A sushi from Nara and Wakayama: thin slices of salted mackerel on vinegared rice, wrapped in a persimmon leaf and pressed. The leaf is for aroma and keeping and is not eaten. It began as a way to eat over-salted fish with rice.

🇪🇸Spanish

Bacalao al Pil Pil (Salt Cod in an Oil Sauce Bound by Its Own Gelatin)

A Basque dish of desalted cod cooked gently in garlic-scented olive oil, after which the pan is swirled until the gelatin the fish gives off binds the oil into a thick yellow sauce. An emulsion made by the wrist, not by boiling.

🇬🇾Guyanese

Pepperpot (Cassareep Beef Stew)

The stew Guyana counts as a national dish: collagen-rich cuts such as oxtail and cow heel, simmered for hours with cinnamon, cloves, thyme, orange peel and whole hot peppers in a seasoning of cassareep, until the liquid is nearly black. Cassareep is the juice of bitter cassava boiled down to a syrup like molasses, and both the colour and the savour of the stew come from it. It is eaten on Christmas morning with fresh bread.

🇮🇷Iranian

Kufteh Tabrizi (Giant Stuffed Meatballs in Broth)

The big meatball of Tabriz in Iran. Minced beef is worked for a long time with cooked rice and yellow split peas, wrapped around a boiled egg, walnuts and dried apricot, shaped larger than a fist and simmered for an hour in a tomato broth. The broth is eaten first with torn bread; the kufteh comes after.

🇧🇷Brazilian

Galinhada (One-Pot Chicken and Rice with Pequi)

One-pot chicken and rice from Goiás and Minas Gerais in central Brazil. The chicken is browned, onion, garlic and tomato go into the same pot, the rice is fried in the fat, and then the water goes in. The yellow comes from annatto (colorau). In Goiás it is cooked with whole pequi fruits, whose stones are covered in thin, tough spines, so the pulp is scraped off gently with the teeth. Never bite into one.

🇮🇹Italian

Bistecca alla Fiorentina (Florentine T-Bone Steak)

Florence's T-bone steak: a cut from the loin with the fillet on one side of the bone and the sirloin on the other, 5-6cm thick, grilled over embers that have stopped flaming. It goes on with no salt and no oil, is turned once to build the crust, and finishes standing upright on its bone so the meat by the bone cooks through. The centre is rare, 50-52°C. Salt and olive oil go on after it comes off the fire.

🇰🇷Korean

Agwi-jjim (Spicy Monkfish with Bean Sprouts)

The spicy monkfish dish from Masan. The fish cooks under a lid in a little stock, the bean sprouts wilt in the steam on top of it, and then everything is tossed at once with a chilli seasoning and a starch slurry. It is called jjim, but nothing here is steamed and nothing is braised for long.

🇲🇾Malaysian

Nasi Kerabu (Blue Butterfly-Pea Rice with Raw Herbs)

The blue rice of Kelantan on Malaysia's east coast. The rice is cooked in water steeped with butterfly-pea flowers, and eaten mixed with finely cut raw herbs and vegetables, toasted coconut and fried fish or chicken. The blue is an anthocyanin, which turns purple when it meets acid — so no acid goes into the cooking water, and the lime and the sour sauces wait at the side of the plate. The herbs are never cooked and go on last.

🇱🇰Sri Lankan

Kiribath (Coconut Milk Rice Pressed and Cut into Diamonds)

Sri Lanka's festival rice. The rice is cooked soft in water first, thick coconut milk goes in after and is cooked down, and the hot rice is pressed flat, left to cool and cut into diamonds. Rice cooked with coconut milk usually stays in separate grains; this one has to hold together as a block to be cut. Letting the water reach the starch first, leaving the surface starch on, and pressing it while hot are what do it. Served with lunu miris, a hot onion relish.

🇵🇸Palestinian

Sumaghiyya (Sumac-Soured Chard and Beef, Served Cold)

A holiday dish from Gaza. Ground sumac is steeped in water and strained, tahini and flour are whisked into the sour liquid, and it is poured over fried chard, boiled chopped beef and chickpeas and cooked until thick. Garlic, chilli and dill seed fried in olive oil go in at the end, and it is served cold with pita. The sumac here is not a finishing sprinkle but the body of the sauce, so the method is about thickening a sour liquid and about seasoning a dish that will be eaten cold.

🇨🇳Chinese

Tieguodun (Iron-Pot Stew with Corn Bread on the Rim)

Dongbei's iron-pot stew: pork ribs, potato, green beans and mushrooms simmered a long time in a big cast-iron pot, with rounds of corn dough slapped onto the sloping wall above the liquid and cooked under the lid at the same time. The face of the bread against the iron crusts; the face turned into the pot is steamed by the stew. One pot gives you the stew and its bread together.

🇲🇰Macedonian

Tavče Gravče (White Beans Baked in a Clay Pan)

North Macedonia's national dish. Soaked white beans are boiled once and drained, then boiled again in fresh water with a whole onion and dried chillies. When the onion is soft it is lifted out, chopped and fried briefly in oil with flour and paprika, and stirred back into the pot. The beans then go into an earthenware tava and bake in the oven. The onion, the slowest aromatic of all, is cooked in the bean water before it ever meets the fat.

🇵🇪Peruvian

Tacacho con Cecina (Roasted Green Plantain Balls with Cured Pork)

The Peruvian Amazon's signature plate: green plantain roasted over charcoal, mashed while hot with lard and shaped into balls (tacacho), served beside grilled cecina — salted, dried pork — and chorizo. The plantain is used as a starch, like a potato, not as a fruit, and only a green one, low in sugar, can sit over coals long enough to cook through without burning. Nothing is boiled, so no water goes in; the lard is all that loosens the mash.

🇳🇮Nicaraguan

Nacatamal (Pork Tamal with a Pre-Cooked Masa, Boiled in Banana Leaf)

A pork tamal counted among Nicaragua's national dishes. Corn masa is thinned with sour orange, aromatics and pork stock, stirred in a pot of melted lard until it thickens, and cooled; raw marinated pork, soaked rice, potato, tomato and mint go on top, and the whole is tied tight in banana leaf and boiled for three hours. The masa is cooked before it ever meets the leaf, so the time in the pot belongs to what went in raw: the pork and the rice.

🇧🇴Bolivian

Majadito (Rice with Pounded Dried Beef)

Eastern Bolivia's rice dish: charque, salted and dried beef, soaked, boiled and pounded in a mortar until it falls into threads, then cooked through rice coloured yellow with annatto. It comes with a fried egg, fried plantain and boiled yuca. The name is the method — majao means pounded — and meat beaten apart rather than cut spreads evenly through every spoonful of rice.

🇵🇭Filipino

Kaldereta (Goat Stew Finished with Liver Paste)

A Filipino goat stew. Bone-in goat simmers with tomato for the better part of two hours, then potato, carrot, pepper and olives go in, and last of all a liver paste is stirred through to thicken it. The liver is what gives the sauce its body and its deep, dark savour — and since liver turns chalky with long heat, in a dish that simmers for two hours it goes in last.

🇨🇳Chinese

Jiaohua Ji (Beggar's Chicken Baked in Lotus Leaf and Clay)

Hangzhou's whole chicken, marinated, stuffed, wrapped in lotus leaves and then coated thickly in clay and baked slowly in the fire for hours. The hardened shell is cracked at the table and the bird comes out in its own juices, scented with the leaf. A leaf on its own lasts minutes in a fire; here the clay takes the fire and the leaf, inside it, gives its aroma instead of burning. At home a flour-and-salt dough makes the same shell.

🇯🇵Japanese

Goya Champuru (Bitter Melon Stir-Fry with Tofu and Egg)

Okinawa's signature stir-fry: bitter melon with firm island tofu, pork and egg over high heat. Most dishes built on a bitter vegetable wash the bitterness out or boil it down; goya never meets water at all. It is salted briefly to draw its water, stir-fried for two minutes, and its bitterness is kept and used as a contrast against bland tofu and egg and fatty pork. The tofu is torn by hand, not cut.

🇧🇷Brazilian

Feijão Tropeiro (Beans Tossed with Toasted Cassava Flour, Bacon and Egg)

A bean dish from Minas Gerais: cooked beans tossed with egg and kale in the fat left from frying bacon and sausage, with toasted cassava flour added last to take up all the fat and the bean liquid in the pan. The flour has already been toasted and needs no more cooking, so it works the instant it goes in, turning a bean dish with liquid into one with none. The name comes from the muleteers of seventeenth-century Brazil.

🇾🇪Yemeni

Fahsa (Shredded Lamb Stew with Fenugreek Froth)

A Yemeni stew: lamb simmered in maraq, the spiced meat broth, until it leaves the bone, shredded, brought to a hard bubble in a heated stone pot, and served still boiling under hulba — ground fenugreek whipped into a pale froth. Flatbread torn off by hand is the spoon. The face of the dish is a foam raised from a legume seed and put on top, rather than skimmed off.

🇿🇦South African

Bunny Chow (Mutton Curry in a Hollowed Loaf)

Durban's bunny chow: a quarter of an unsliced white loaf, hollowed out and filled with a thick mutton and potato curry. The scooped-out bread sits on top for dipping, and the walls are torn off by hand as you go. A bread bowl drinks what it holds, and here nothing stops it: the curry-soaked inner wall is the point of the dish.

🇯🇵Japanese

Yudofu (Tofu Warmed in Kombu Water)

Kyoto's tofu pot: tofu in an earthenware pot over a sheet of kombu, the water brought up to just short of the boil, and each piece lifted out the moment it starts to sway and dipped in a soy sauce. The tofu is eaten out of its water, so the water is plain with kombu, and it is never boiled: boiled tofu tightens and pits with holes, and the kombu on the bottom turns slimy and bitter. One temperature protects both.

🇨🇺Cuban

Vaca Frita (Boiled Beef Shredded Fine and Pan-Crisped with Lime)

Cuban beef: flank boiled in plain water until it falls apart, shredded fine, tossed with lime and garlic, then pressed thin into a hot pan and left until it crisps. Ropa vieja starts from the same pot and spends the shredded surface on a sauce; vaca frita spends it on a crust. So it is shredded finer, the marinade is squeezed out, and nobody touches it in the pan.

🇺🇿Uzbek

Tuxum Barak (Dumplings Filled with Raw Egg)

A dumpling from Khorezm in Uzbekistan: a thin half-moon of dough sealed along its edge first, then filled through a gap left for it with raw beaten egg, still liquid, pinched shut and boiled. The rule for dumplings is that a liquid filling cannot be wrapped at all. This one keeps the filling and changes the order instead: seal first, fill last. In four or five minutes in the pot the egg sets, so what was a liquid when it was wrapped is a solid when it is eaten.

🇯🇵Japanese

Tenshinhan (Crab Omelette on Rice under a Starch-Thickened Sauce)

A Japanese-Chinese dish: a soft crab omelette slid onto rice and covered with a sweet-and-sour sauce thickened with starch. The fact that heat moves poorly through a thick liquid is, in a pot, an obstacle that dictates the order of cooking; on the plate it is the design. The sauce lies over the egg and rice like a lid and keeps them hot.

🇯🇵Japanese

Takikomi Gohan (Rice Cooked with Seasoned Dashi, Chicken and Vegetables)

Japan's one-pot rice: dashi seasoned with soy, mirin and sake, with chicken, burdock, carrot, shiitake and aburaage laid on top and cooked in the same pot, so their juices run down between the grains. The rice is soaked in plain water and the seasoning goes in only as the heat goes on, because seasoned water slows how fast the grain drinks and the soak would not do its job. The soy counts towards the water line, and the ingredients sit on top, unstirred.

🇮🇷Iranian

Shirin Polo (Sweet Rice with Candied Orange Peel and a Tahdig Crust)

Iran's celebration rice: basmati boiled in plenty of salted water, drained, then steamed over oil, with orange peel and carrot candied in syrup, almonds and pistachios laid on top. The sweetness is only on the top, never in the pot, and the bottom of the pot holds a crust, the tahdig, built on purpose from the start. Because the rice was drained there is no free water at the bottom, so the oil there climbs to frying heat while the rice above it steams.

🇧🇷Brazilian

Pato no Tucupi (Duck in Tucupi with Jambu)

The duck dish of Belém, in the Brazilian state of Pará: duck roasted, then simmered in yellow tucupi and finished with jambu, a leaf that makes the mouth tingle, with rice and cassava flour alongside. Tucupi is the juice wrung out of grated cassava when that flour is made. Elsewhere that liquid is thrown away; here it is settled to drop its starch, fermented, and boiled until the poison is gone, and it becomes the broth.

🇮🇩Indonesian

Papeda (Sago Starch Porridge with Yellow Fish Soup)

The staple of eastern Indonesia, from Maluku to Papua: sago palm starch slaked in cold water, then boiling water poured on while it is stirred, until the milky slurry turns in a moment to a clear grey glue. It is cooked by the kettle alone, with no pan, wound onto two sticks before it can set, and eaten under a turmeric fish soup (kuah kuning), swallowed rather than chewed. It is a starch gel cooked all the way and eaten before it sets.

🇬🇩Grenadian

Oil Down (Breadfruit and Taro Leaves Cooked Down in Coconut Milk)

Grenada's national dish: breadfruit, taro leaves, salted meat and flour dumplings layered in one pot under turmeric-yellow coconut milk and cooked until the liquid is gone. The "down" in the name means cooked down, and the moment the coconut oil is all that is left is the sign that it is ready. The taro leaves go in first and cook longest, and the reason is not texture.

🇪🇹Ethiopian

Kitfo (Raw Minced Beef in Warm Spiced Butter)

Ethiopian raw beef, chopped fine and turned through warm spiced clarified butter (niter kibbeh) with mitmita. Yukhoe and steak tartare pick a lean cut and serve it cold, because cold fat reads as wax. Kitfo picks the same lean cut and then puts the fat back as butter, which sets on a cold plate — so this raw beef is served warm, mixed in a pan off the heat and eaten at once.

🇮🇳Indian

Khichdi (Rice and Split Mung Dal Cooked to the Same Point)

India's everyday one-pot: rice and hulled split mung dal put in together and taken off together. Other dishes that cook a grain and a pulse in one pot work around the fact that the pulse takes far longer, by soaking it overnight or boiling it first. This one removes the problem instead, by choosing a pulse whose clock already matches the rice, and finishes with cumin fried in ghee and poured over.

🇯🇵Japanese

Jingisukan (Lamb Grilled on a Domed Pan with Vegetables at the Rim)

Hokkaido's grilled lamb. The meat cooks on the crown of a domed cast-iron pan, and the fat that runs down gathers at the rim, where onion, cabbage and bean sprouts cook in it. A table grill usually has one temperature; this pan uses its shape to make a hot place and a cooler one.

🇦🇲Armenian

Harisa (Wheat and Chicken Beaten to One Paste)

Armenia's national dish: hulled wheat and chicken simmered together for hours and worked with a wooden spoon until neither one is recognisable. The aim is not tender meat but the destruction of the meat's fibre bundles into the grain, and it is finished with a pool of melted butter poured into the middle.

🇸🇬Singaporean

Har Cheong Gai (Prawn Paste Chicken)

Singapore's fried chicken: wings marinated overnight in Cantonese prawn paste, then flour and starch tipped straight into the same bowl to make the batter, and fried twice. There is no separate marinade and coating — the marinade becomes the coating. So the seasoning sits in the crust rather than in the meat, and the sharp smell of the paste is toasted into something savoury in the frying oil.

🇮🇩Indonesian

Gudeg (Young Jackfruit Braised in Coconut Milk and Palm Sugar)

Yogyakarta's signature dish: young jackfruit, picked long before it ripens, braised for hours in coconut milk and palm sugar and eaten not as a fruit but as a vegetable that pulls apart along its fibres like meat. The red-brown is not from frying or burning anything but from teak leaves laid in the pot, and stopped wet it is a dish for the day, while cooked all the way down it keeps for days.