India, Feb. 7 -- My wife is not a vegetarian. She loves a good meat biryani as much as I do. Give her a kakori kabab, and while the high fat content may vanquish her after the second kabab, she will still enjoy it enormously. But take her to an Indian restaurant abroad and she will suddenly refuse to eat the meat. No mutton kababs for me, she will insist. No lamb at all, she will add. At European restaurants, this refusal will be even more emphatic. Even if I tell her that roast lamb will go perfectly with the very nice Bordeaux I have ordered, she will eat something else. It's difficult to explain to most people - especially foreigners - why she will eat mutton in India but not abroad. But if you understand the linguistic confusion perpetrated by Indian chefs and restaurateurs, then you will know at once what the problem is. The truth is that we don't eat lamb in India. We eat goat. For reasons I have never fully understood, restaurants lie about this. They always pretend they are serving lamb. At Indian restaurants abroad, where goat is often hard to come by, chefs substitute lamb for goat in many dishes. They argue that it tastes nearly the same and that anyway, no one can tell the difference. They are wrong on both counts. Not only does lamb not taste the same as goat, my wife can always tell the difference. It's not just restaurateurs who muddle the distinction. All of us confuse the issue when we speak of mutton. All over the world, mutton has a specific meaning. It refers to meat from a sheep that is more than a year old. A younger animal is called a lamb. (That's why Mary had a little lamb not a grown-up sheep.) But in India, mutton just means meat from a sheep or a lamb or a goat of any age at all. The difference can be crucial; at least when you are dealing with people like my wife, who has the palate of an experienced chef and the nose of a dog. (Okay: A bloodhound, not any old dog.) One important difference between lamb and goat is fat content. A goat has incredibly lean meat. In fact, the meat has less saturated fat than chicken. (Something you should remember when a doctor parrots what he has read in Western textbooks and tells you to give up red meat and eat chicken instead.) A lamb (and especially when it grows to be a sheep) has much more fat. Not only does this make the meat taste different, it also gives it a distinctive odour. My wife recognises the smell immediately and does not like it. Hence the preference for goat and the aversion to lamb. She is hardly unique in this respect. In America, the lamb industry has consistently faced rejection from consumers who object to the smell of lamb fat and much prefer beef instead. In fact, beef consumption in America is more than 50 times lamb consumption largely because of the smell factor. This places American lamb producers in a peculiar position. American consumers like their meat marbled; that is, with veins or specks of fat scattered throughout the lean meat. (Steaks are judged by the level of marbling.) But lamb only gets marbled as it grows older, at which stage it also becomes fattier. And the fat is what gives it the smell, turning off consumers. Producers have tried to find a happy medium by feeding grain (rather than the traditional grass) to lambs, which leads to less smelly fat. Unfortunately, it also gives the meat a neutral blander taste, which defeats the purpose of ordering lamb: Why not just order beef instead? In Europe, on the other hand, they don't mind smellier meat, so lamb has its fans. Farmers have discovered that lamb, much more than beef, captures the flavours of what it is fed. In the UK, they like grass-fed mutton (from a sheep that is over a year old; after two years it is called hogget). In France, they like salt meadow lamb from coastal swamps. All this is of very little relevance to us because in India, we hardly ever eat real lamb. It's nearly always goat, even when chefs believe they are buying lamb. For instance, many chefs will tell you that the only Indian lamb they will use is from Rajasthan, from such towns as Bikaner or Jodhpur. In fact, what they are talking about is almost certainly goat. I asked Jaydeep Patil, currently Culinary Director of Raffles, Jaipur, who I have known since his days as chef at Raj Vilas (where he specialised in Rajasthani ingredients) about the 'lamb'. Jaydeep has no doubt that so-called Rajasthani lamb is goat. He loves the flavour, which he says comes from the wild ingredients the goats eat when they are taken through the Aravalli hills to graze. But the animals are certainly not sheep and don't have the fat that characterises lamb. The one exception to the Indian preference for goat is Kashmir, where there is a tradition of eating lamb, though Kashmiris often eat sheep that are bred for wool, which is a big no-no in much of the West, where sheep are bred separately for wool shearing and for eating. But Kashmiris don't seem to mind and such dishes as tabaq maaz are classics of Indian cuisine. It may also be that sheep, with their woolly coats, fare much better in the Kashmiri winter than goats. When we eat real lamb in the rest of India, it is usually imported; often from New Zealand, a country where sheep outnumber humans by a factor of seven to one or more. At European restaurants in India, you will find New Zealand lamb chops, which are nearly always acceptable but rarely memorable. To get lamb that you will remember, you need to travel abroad. (And even then, my wife won't eat it.) European lamb can be outstanding whether you have it simply cooked or in a stew. But let's give the humble goat the credit it rarely receives. Even in medieval Muslim courts, where there was no bar on eating beef, goat was always preferred by kings, nobles and gourmets. There are very few great beef recipes in the Indian pantheon: It was always goat. Beef was for those who could not afford goat. And yet, we are now ashamed of the animal at the centre of our cuisine. It is time to end the silence of the goats....