Stocks, Sauces and Relishes

Some of the most interesting sauces are halfway to being dishes in their own right, like Indonesian (or Malaysian) gule or gulai or Persian khoreshta. Claudia Roden, in The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, describes khoreshta as ‘by English standards, stews rather than sauces’, made from ‘an infinite variety of ingredients’. I once described gule kambing, an Indonesian lamb (or goat) dish, as ‘a liquid lamb stew – or you can think of it as a very meaty soup’. The khoreshta that you will find here, and the Long-Cooked Beef, are served in Iran or Indonesia as normal accompaniments to plain cooked rice at any family meal. For a party, several different and more elaborate rice dishes are made, and the meat – usually lamb or goat – is cooked in the same sauce; the difference is that the pieces of meat are larger.