Big up the Balti! Birmingham restaurants want curry to get special status

What do Kimchi, Cornish pasties and French baguettes have in common?

They've all been given a special status that protects either where they're from or how they have been made.

And now, makers of a type of curry from Birmingham in England called the balti, want that dish to have a protected status too.

Restaurants in the city say that a balti can only be called a balti if it's made in a very particular way.

Traditional baltis are cooked in the dish they're served in, rather than being transferred to a dish from a pan, according to the restaurants that serve them.

Because of this, eight restaurants in Birmingham have applied to the government's Department of Culture, Media and Sport's (DCMS) Inventories of Living Heritage scheme.

This inventory is supported by Unesco, which runs similar schemes around the world to protect foods like the Cornish Pasty, and places like the Great Wall of China.

The recently created living heritage inventory will also includes special ways of cooking foods can be included.

The balti is a curry created in Birmingham in the 1970s, in a place that has come to be know as 'the Balti Triangle'.

Zaf Hussain, who owns a restaurant in this area called Shababs, said that protecting the curry's status will prevent "balti fraud".

"[The balti's] roots are in Birmingham and in the early 90s, restaurants around the country wanted to jump on to the Balti bandwagon and started introducing it on their menus, which is fine if it's done properly, but it wasn't," the restaurant owner told the BBC.

There are a number of ways foods can get special protection and status.

In the UK, there are two run by our government.

The first is the Geographical Indication (GI) protection schemes, which is run by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)

This gives food and drink with links to very specific places protection - in other words, there are strict rules about whether or not a food item can be called something if it's not from the place it's attached to under this scheme.

For example, only a pasty made in Cornwall can be called a Cornish Pasty, otherwise, they're merely 'pasties'.

The second scheme, Living Heritage, is the new inventory being run by the DCMS.

Instead of food items given special status, it focuses more on the way the traditional, historical way food is cooked.