egetarians, I am afraid there is little for you to chew on.

This one is all about the glorious textures of meat, from the satisfying chew of chunk meat to the insubstantial lightness of pates.

There is little you can do with a vegetable to alter its texture. But meat, now that's a whole different ball game!

There is a grotty little dhaba in the bowels of the old city around Delhi's Jama Masjid. It is called Al Jawahar, and it is next door to Karim's.

It doesn't spice its almost entirely meat-based cookery the way Karim's does. So it has remained firmly in the background. But there is one area in which Al Jawahar takes the pants off Karim's -- in the cuts of meat it uses.

It is streets ahead of its famous neighbour. Like Karim's, Al Jawahar, which is owned by a family of butchers, cuts its meat across the grain. But there all resemblance ends.

Al Jawahar's lamb never separates from the bone. What trick lies up its sleeve? I guess we will never know.

I have yet to encounter a recipe book of Indian cookery that tells you what cut of lamb is appropriate for what dish, but it is vital.

Imtiaz Qureshi, doyen of Lucknow's cooks, differentiates every gravy dish from the next by the specific cut of meat he uses.

In Hong Kong, and very probably mainland China too, meat -- primarily pork and beef -- is cut in a certain way so that it is tender and free of gristle. How do they manage it? That is another trick we will never know.

It cannot be only due to the small size of the pieces they use -- Chinese restaurants in India also use similar sized pieces, but they entirely lack the texture of their Hong Kong counterparts.

My pet hate has just got to be Kashmiri recipe books that tell you to use finely minced lamb for ristas and gushtabas. It's entirely misleading.

These two meatballs differ in size, but the treatment is the same: large chunks of meat are pounded for ages until not a trace of sinew remains, so it is not at all minced meat, but pounded meat.

Ristas and gushtabas are pounded thoroughly when uncooked, but shami kebabs and shikampur kebabs are pounded, by roughly the same method, after they are cooked.

And there is a dramatic difference in their texture.

The galauti kebab is made from chunk meat that has first been pounded, then minced (this is the 21st century, after all) and then passed through a sieve.

Chef Kunal Kapur of Made in India in MBD Radisson, Noida, says that passing it through a sieve ensures that not only is the texture melt-in-the-mouth, even the merest fibre gets eliminated for a completely silky texture.

Hyderabadi haleem and Kashmiri harissa are two meat dishes in which the meat is cooked and pounded at the same time, one with wheat and the other with rice.

Here, too, all traces of gristle and fibre are eliminated. But the one dish that elevates meat to another level altogether is chicken liver pate: it is as soft as butter, and is used to spread on bread.