Yemeni Mutton Mandi

Mandi is traditionally associated with Yemen’s Hadhramaut region, where meat is cooked slowly with heat and smoke while its juices flavour the rice below. Reproducing that setup in a home kitchen requires a little architectural improvisation.

Here, a whole goat leg sits on a rack above a pot of water scented with black lime, whole spices, chillies, peppers and garlic. Three hours in the oven turns the liquid underneath into a broth enriched by everything dripping down from the goat. Then the rack disappears, rice goes into that broth, the leg comes back on top, and the whole arrangement returns to the oven to finish together.

A final blast of charcoal smoke does its best impression of the traditional cooking environment.

It is essentially a three-hour exercise in making gravity season your rice, followed by the extremely satisfying act of putting an entire goat leg on the table.