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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I love curry but can't help feeling that meat as delicious as good lamb or fish is wasted in the strong flavor of the curry - better to have a vegetarian curry and enjoy the curry flavors on their own, cook the lamb separately.

Well cooked lamb is so delicious it - in my opinion should be eaten only with gravy or a tiny dab of mustard or tiny dab of mint sauce.

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There’s an assumption that ingredients taste good on their own in the west. Most Asian cuisine relies heavily on creating a fantastic spice mix that the meat provides a background flavor to. Texture also matters a lot. The background flavor is not interchangeable.

For instance I love fish curries but can’t stand regular roasted/steamed fish lightly flavored with salt, dill, butter etc.

The main point I got from the OP was that mutton (meat from sheep over 2 years old) and lamb (meat from sheep younger than 1 year) have pretty different taste and other culinary qualities as meat. In particular, that mutton is much stronger flavored and tougher, lamb more tender and delicately flavored.

Yet the comments section is full of people treating them interchangeably, replying to someone who talked about mutton by talking about lamb, or vice versa, or talking about "lamb/mutton". I'm not sure if the commentors disagree with the OP and think it's over-stating the difference? Or just aren't really paying attention.

I (who live in the USA) have had plenty of lamb, but have never had mutton. So I can't say from personal experience.

But this is one of those HN articles where the comments section seems entirely divorced from the article.

I make curry out of lamb neck chops with the bones in. It's delicious and what else are you going to do with them?

In addition to curries I make a New Mexican style posole stew with my necks - it is also delicious.

Please try Rogan ghosht if you have not. That recipe when done right is the perfect mutton curry ever made. This is a recipe from North India, then there's South Indian mutton curries that tastes quite good, particularly the ones in South of Tamilnadu.

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