Purelyrecipes
Find a recipe
Recipe

Butter chicken

Smoky tandoor-roasted chicken, sunk in a sauce of tomato, butter and cream: butter chicken, or murgh makhani, might be the friendliest curry on earth . It…

Butter chicken
Photo: sankethstudio / Pixabay

Smoky tandoor-roasted chicken, sunk in a sauce of tomato, butter and cream: butter chicken, or murgh makhani, might be the friendliest curry on earth 12. It comes from the Punjabi kitchens that moved into Delhi after the 1947 Partition, and it is so loved that two restaurant families went to court to settle who made it first 34. In the coverage we found, no judge has ruled.

Background

The dish starts with chicken cooked in a tandoor, the clay oven of north-west India 15. The sauce does the rest: tomatoes, butter and cream, warmed with garam masala and a pinch of kasuri methi, the dried fenugreek leaves that give it that faintly sweet, hay-like smell 1. Some cooks add cardamom, cumin, cloves, cinnamon or a spoon of cashew paste for body 1.

It is mild, rich and forgiving, which may be its secret. Food writer Kartikey Bhargava sums it up as tandoori chicken in a creamy, slightly spicy tomato sauce: comfort food that crosses borders easily 2.

History

Here's the version almost everyone agrees on. Kundan Lal Gujral ran an eatery called Moti Mahal in Peshawar, in what is now Pakistan 35. When Partition split British India in 1947, Gujral fled to Delhi as a refugee and opened a new Moti Mahal in the Daryaganj neighbourhood 25.

The restaurant's own story says tandoori chickens hung over the oven dried out if they didn't sell, so Gujral made a gravy of tomato, butter and cream to bring the leftovers back to life 5. Outlook Traveller tells it the same way: leftover chicken, a rich sauce, and the birth of the "makhni gravy" 6. MENU Magazine adds a second twist, a customer who wanted a curry to go with the tandoori chicken 2. Moti Mahal also credits Gujral with dal makhani, the black-lentil dish in the same buttery sauce 5.

Now the fight. In January 2024 the Gujral family sued a newer chain, Daryaganj, in the Delhi High Court 34. Their 2,752-page filing says Gujral invented butter chicken in Peshawar, in the 1930s by one report and around 1920 by another, before he ever reached Delhi 34. Grandson Monish Gujral put it plainly: "The dish was invented when our grandfather was in Pakistan" 37. Wikipedia notes his own 2013 book had placed the dish's birth in Delhi 1.

Daryaganj, opened in 2019, says its late relative Kundan Lal Jaggi was Gujral's partner in the 1947 Delhi restaurant, where the dish was born, and showed Reuters a faded handwritten partnership deed registered in 1949 3. Their lawyer argued the two men set up even the Peshawar restaurant together 4. MENU Magazine names a third founder, Thakur Dass, and places the dish's first serving in Delhi in the 1950s 2. The court asked Daryaganj to respond and set a hearing for May 2024 34. As one intellectual-property lawyer told Reuters, "You really don't know who created the first dish of butter chicken" 3.

Customs, rules and rituals

Butter chicken belongs to the Punjabi dhaba and restaurant world, not a festival calendar. After Partition, displaced Punjabis opened dhabas along the Grand Trunk Road serving rotis, parathas, dal and vegetables, and these roadside kitchens carried Punjabi food across India 6. The tandoor travelled with them 6.

At the table it usually sits with bread and lentils: Moti Mahal pairs its chicken dishes with the vegetarian dal makhani, made with the same butter sauce 5. That makes it an easy meal for a mixed table, with something for the vegetarians too.

Abroad, cooks have run wild with it. In Canada and the Caribbean it turns up on pizza, in poutine, wraps and roti; in Australia and New Zealand it fills a meat pie 1.

Place in human experience

Butter chicken is a refugee's dish. Outlook Traveller writer Ranee Sahaney describes Partition displacing Punjabis who brought the tandoor and "a whole new landscape of barbequed fare" to the rest of India 6. By the restaurant's own account, Gujral got the Delhi site through a Rehabilitation Conveyance Deed 5.

The dish also became Delhi's calling card. Moti Mahal lists Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the Shah of Iran, Richard Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy among its guests, and quotes the statesman Maulana Azad: visiting Delhi without eating there was like visiting Agra without seeing the Taj Mahal 5. Its tandoori food, the family's lawyers say, became a fixture at Nehru's banquets 4.

From there it went everywhere. Wikipedia traces its first appearance in English print to 1975, at the Gaylord restaurant in Manhattan 1, and it now ranks among the world's best-known dishes on the TasteAtlas list 3. Some diners abroad even assume it is a Western invention, a mix-up it shares with chicken tikka masala 1.

So when you stir butter into tomato tonight, you're cooking a story of loss and starting over, a fridge-full of leftovers rescued, and a family feud still before a judge.

Sources

  1. "Butter chicken", Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter_chicken
  2. Kartikey Bhargava, "Butter Chicken: A Brief History", MENU Magazine (2019), https://menumag.ca/2019/04/11/butter-chicken-a-brief-history/
  3. Reuters, "Who invented butter chicken? Indian judge to rule on dispute over global favourite", Arab News (2024), https://www.arabnews.pk/node/2447276
  4. "Court set to determine who invented butter chicken after dispute", 1News (2024), https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/01/22/court-set-to-determine-who-invented-butter-chicken-after-dispute
  5. "Our Story", Moti Mahal, https://motimahal.in/our-story/
  6. Ranee Sahaney, "How Partition Has Shaped The Food We Eat", Outlook Traveller (2022), https://www.outlooktraveller.com/experiences/food-and-drink/how-partition-has-shaped-the-food-we-eat
  7. Reuters, "Butter chicken dispute" (republished), Dawn Images (2024), https://images.dawn.com/news/1192217