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Chicken Tikka Masala

Smoky chunks of marinated chicken swimming in a creamy, orange, gently spiced tomato sauce: chicken tikka masala is the curry that a British Foreign…

Chicken Tikka Masala
Photo: veersajid / Pixabay

Smoky chunks of marinated chicken swimming in a creamy, orange, gently spiced tomato sauce: chicken tikka masala is the curry that a British Foreign Secretary once crowned "a true British national dish" 1. Everyone wants to have invented it. Glasgow says it did. Delhi says nonsense. Newcastle, Birmingham and London put their hands up too. And the most famous origin story of all, the one with the tin of tomato soup, was cooked up over a couple of bottles of wine 23. Pull up a chair.

Background

Two parts make the dish. Tikka means "pieces", a word that travelled from Persian into Hindi and Urdu 4: boneless chicken marinated in yoghurt and spice, then roasted hot in a tandoor. Masala is the sauce, usually tomato, cream or yoghurt and spices, mild enough to win over people who don't like chilli 5.

There's no single recipe. When Glasgow tried to get official protection for the dish in 2009, almost 50 quite different British recipes were in circulation, sharing little more than chicken 2.

History

The tikka half is old. Tandoor ovens go back thousands of years, and boneless tikka is traced to the court of Babur, the first Mughal emperor, who brought his tastes from Central Asia's Ferghana Valley 2.

The sauce half is where the arguments start. Here are the claims, side by side:

  • Glasgow, 1970s. Ali Ahmed Aslam, born in Pakistan and raised in Glasgow, opened the Shish Mahal in 1964 5. He told AFP that a customer complained his chicken tikka was too dry, so the kitchen cooked it in a sauce of yoghurt, cream and spices. "It's a dish prepared according to our customer's taste," he said 5.
  • Glasgow, 1950s. Sultan Ahmed Ansari of the city's Taj Mahal restaurant claimed the dish years before the Shish Mahal opened, according to curry historian Peter Grove 2.
  • India. Delhi food writer Rahul Verma says he ate it in Punjab or Uttar Pradesh earlier in the 1970s. Another Delhi writer points to a recipe in the 1961 edition of Balbir Singh's Indian Cookery. A chef at Delhi's Karim Hotel says the family recipe is Mughal and far older 2.
  • Everywhere at once. Grove's own view is that the dish grew out of butter chicken, created at Moti Mahal in Delhi in 1948, and that chefs across Britain adapted it to local tastes at much the same time 2.

And the tomato soup? The story says a chef rescued a dry tikka with a tin of Campbell's condensed tomato soup. The restaurateur Iqbal Wahhab says flatly: "I made it up" 3. Grove admits he and Wahhab started the myth as a joke because journalists didn't like the real, messier answer, adding: "a couple of bottles of wine urged us on" 2. It still turns up in newspapers, including a 2009 BBC report 6.

That 2009 report covered Glasgow MP Mohammad Sarwar's bid for EU Protected Designation of Origin status, the same protection given to Melton Mowbray pork pies. It failed, partly because so many other restaurants claimed the dish 256.

Customs, rules and rituals

Chicken tikka masala is curry-house food first. Britain's first Indian restaurant, the Hindoostane Coffee House, opened in London in 1809, run by the traveller and entrepreneur Sake Dean Mahomed 2. The big wave came after partition, with migrants from India and Pakistan arriving from the late 1950s 2. Chefs from different places put their own stamp on it: Bangladeshi and Indian cooks in the south of England, Kashmiris in the Midlands, Pakistanis in the north, Punjabis and Bangladeshis in Scotland 2.

It soon jumped from restaurant to fridge. By 1983 Waitrose sold it as a ready meal 2. Heinz later put it in a tin 2. There's a National Curry Week, and somebody in Newport, Wales, even wrote a song about it 2.

And yes, it's a late-night institution: Roads & Kingdoms notes curry houses are a mainstay of Britain's after-hours and hangover eating 2.

Place in human experience

On 19 April 2001, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook gave a speech on British identity. Chicken tikka masala, he said, was a national dish "not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences", adding that "the Massala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy" 1.

Not everyone cheered. Wahhab wrote that Cook had picked "this particular made-up dish, concocted to soothe the sensitive British palate", and pointed out that the classic curry house was still decorated the way owners thought the British imagined India: minarets outside, pub-style velour seats inside 1.

In India, the Glasgow claim landed badly. Critics there called the protection bid anything from absurd to a kind of culinary colonialism, claiming a dish built on centuries of South Asian cooking 2.

So whose dish is it? Maybe everyone's. Grove calls it "one of those things that evolved when conditions were right" 2. By 2009 Britons ate around 25 million portions a year, and 65,000 people worked cooking and serving it 2. When Ali Ahmed Aslam died in December 2022, the Shish Mahal closed for 48 hours and invited its customers to his funeral at Glasgow Central Mosque. One regular, who first ate there aged two, told CNN the staff still asked after his parents 57. Whoever invented it, that is what the dish means: a family business, a city's favourite table, and a country slowly learning to call it home.

Sources

  1. "Robin Cook's chicken tikka masala speech" (extract of speech, 19 April 2001, with Iqbal Wahhab's reply in The Independent), UK Curry Scene. https://curryhouse.co.uk/scene/robincook.html
  2. "Who owns Chicken Tikka Masala?", Roads & Kingdoms, 2014. https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2014/who-owns-chicken-tikka-masala/
  3. Iqbal Wahhab, "Curry myths", iqbalwahhab.com. http://www.iqbalwahhab.com/curry-myths/
  4. "Chicken tikka masala", Wikipedia (etymology of tikka). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala
  5. Nadeem Badshah, "Ali Ahmed Aslam, inventor of chicken tikka masala, dies at 77", The Guardian, 21 December 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/dec/21/ali-ahmed-aslam-inventor-chicken-tikka-masala-dies-77
  6. "Glasgow 'invented' Tikka Masala", BBC News, July 2009. https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8161812.stm
  7. "Inventor of the UK's 'true national dish' dies at 77", CNN Travel, December 2022. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/ali-ahmed-aslam-chicken-tikka-masala-glasgow