Almost every cuisine includes beef dishes, with the one major exception being that of Hindu, from which beef is excluded for religious reasons.
Beef dishes are almost always cooked, by a variety of methods, though beef interestingly is perhaps the only meat which can also sometimes be encountered in rare or raw form, such as rare steak, Carpaccio, Steak tartare, Tiger Meat, etc.
In the West, we tend to think of beef as largely a European or English-speaking world meat, but it is popular in Asian cuisines as well. Vietnamese cuisine has “Bò 7 món”, a seven-course meal of beef dishes which is served at banquets and feasts, and Korean cuisine is popular for its beef dishes such as bulgogi or galbi.
The difference between Western and Eastern presentation of beef is usually in size of pieces and portion. Western cuisine tends to cook beef in large pieces, known as “joints” or “roasts”, or slices known as “steaks” (even ground beef is usually formed together to make a large portion of meat, such as a pattie.) In Eastern cooking, beef is usually sliced quite thinly before cooking in order to accommodate their different cooking methods such as stir fry.
History Notes
In Classical Rome, beef was only eaten on very special occasions. Cattle were needed instead to pull ploughs.