Immos – meaning ‘his mother’s milk’

Recipes for meat cooked in milk or yoghourt abound in early cookery manuals. Today, they are still a great favourite throughout most of the Middle East, as well as in the Balkans and India.

The name of this particular version, a Lebanese one, implies that the meat of a young animal is cooked in his own mother’s milk, a vivid and rather tragic image which, of course, makes this and other similar dishes prohibited by Jewish dietary law: ‘Thou shalt not cook the lamb in his mother’s mi