Birmingham's Beloved Balti

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2018

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

For food writer Yasmin Khan, the Balti conjures up family meals out in her childhood home of Birmingham where she would regularly tuck into deep bowls of the city's most iconic dish -- richly spiced chicken or lamb, that she scooped up with freshly made warm naan breads.

In it's heyday, the Sparkhill area of Birmingham was saturated with Balti restaurants, so much so that it became known as the "Balti Triangle", a place which defined Birmingham's food scene and became one of the few parts of the UK where working class, immigrant, food was celebrated.

Since then, the Balti has grown in reputation as one of Britain's truly regional dishes, so much so that a bid was made, albeit unsuccessfully, to give it protected EU status.

Now, Yasmin heads back to Birmingham to explore what this uniquely British-Pakistani dish means to a new generation of people growing up in the so-called 'Balti Triangle'. What she finds is a community with strong bonds and deep pride, that continues to come together around a deep love of food.

Presented by Yasmin Khan Produced in Bristol by Clare Salisbury.

Transcript

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0:43.9	Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program.
0:49.0	Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture,
0:52.3	politics to pleasure. We hope you enjoy it.
0:55.0	I hate to be the one to break it to you, but a British food institution,
1:01.0	the home of one of the UK's only truly regional dishes, a dish
1:06.7	that came to represent multicultural Britain, is dead.
1:11.3	I'm talking about the bolty triangle. A few blocks of streets just southeast of Birmingham City Centre, named after one dish and one dish only.
1:22.0	The Balti basically, it's a Birmingham dish.
1:25.0	It's different to a curry,
1:29.0	because it's like a cross between you'd say Chinese stir-fry and Indian Pakistani.
1:37.0	It was made from working class to their super-starred. But that superstar status is faltering.
1:45.0	Once the go-to destination for a hungry brummy on a Friday or Saturday night, the bolty triangle used to have a plethora of
	...

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