"Back home in India, Kundan Lal Jaggi and Kundan Lal Gujaral (and Thakur Das), who had arrived in Delhi after partition first served butter chicken in the 1950s. Their story of how the dish was invented is similar to Ali’s."
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Chicken tikka masala or butter chicken: The origins of this popular style of chicken are irrelevant
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At the time of Independence from the British, as a result of the Radcliffe Line, India got divided into three. Still, many things kept the new nations as well as the former colonial master connected. One of these is a style of chicken which is known as butter chicken in India and chicken tikka masala in the UK. The inventors of these two dishes came from what is today Pakistan.
Chicken tikka masala is made of chicken that has been roasted and then served in a rich curry “sauce”. Like several other excellent things, chicken tikka masala is passionately debated and argued over. Some people speculate that it is the British version of a curry, while others are confident that it is simply the Indian-origin butter chicken by another name. It is believed that chicken tikka masala was created by Ali Ahmed Aslam, a Pakistan-origin chef, in Glasgow, Scotland. Allegedly, he introduced Chicken Tikka Masala at his restaurant Shish Mahal, sparking a culinary revolution in the UK. We lost this culinary genius at the age of 77 on December 19, 2022, but his legacy lives on.
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In a 2009 video interview, Ali claimed that he came up with the idea of chicken tikka masala. According to him, this dish came out in 1972 when a customer felt that his chicken tikka was dry. He wanted some sauce on the side, but Ali went one step ahead and instead of just serving the sauce on the side, he tossed the chicken in a quick gravy or masala. The chicken tikka masala soon became the most popular dish in British restaurants.
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Ali’s story makes the chicken tikka masala a Scottish-Pakistani dish, but in 2001, Robin Cook, then the British Foreign Secretary, said “chicken tikka masala is a British national dish—chicken tikka was an Indian dish, and the British added the sauce, because of their desire to have meat served in gravy.”
Back home in India, Kundan Lal Jaggi and Kundan Lal Gujaral (and Thakur Das), who had arrived in Delhi after partition first served butter chicken in the 1950s. Their story of how the dish was invented is similar to Ali’s.
Matt Ridley, the author of The Rational Optimist and The Evolution of Everything, has a theory about such overlapping inventions. He calls them simultaneous discovery and invention. According to him, if Edison had not invented the light bulb, it’s not as if humanity would have remained in the dark. History presented an issue, a sufficient number of people working on it at a specific moment leading to similar inventions around the same time. Going by his theory, perhaps this recipe belongs to all the claimants. In one of my many conversations with chef Saransh Goila of Goila Butter Chicken (which I love), he said he serves his family recipe and that no one can have a set butter chicken recipe. For example, the popular Baba Butter Chicken in Ludhiana had adopted his methi malai murgh recipe and I’m sure I will make it differently myself. In this sense, butter chicken is truly a democratic dish.
Perhaps the only thing that separates chicken tikka masala from butter chicken is the fact that the former uses boneless chicken, but we now have boneless butter chicken as well.
Madhur Jaffrey says in one of her recipe videos on Food Network UK “I never wanted to put Chicken Tikka Masala in my cookbook because I felt it is not an Indian dish, it is something invented in Britain out of Chicken Tikka’s probably leftovers.” And, on the flip side, Chef Keith Sarasin says, “Chicken tikka masala is often the gateway to Indian food for the uninitiated in America.”
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The word “tikka” was introduced to the Indian subcontinent with Babur; it essentially means bite-sized meat. The associated flavours, which we believe to be Indian, surely has Persian and Samarkand influences.
Many would argue the word “curry” itself was created by the British during the colonial period to reductively describe all foreign-looking gravy-based dishes.
During my trip to Bangladesh in 2016, I tried a similar dish called the shahi chicken tikka masala; it uses the exact same ingredients, but the chef told me they named it “shahi” as a branding exercise. It also referred to the addition of almond and cashew paste to the masala (many in India too add cashew to thicken the gravy).
“Food evolves throughout time, and inspiration often leads to innovation. Chicken tikka masala might evoke controversy on the question of its ‘authenticity’, but at the end of the day, it’s inspired countless people to begin the journey of discovering the true beauty of Indian food,” says Chef Sarasin. I agree with him: The next time you eat chicken tikka masala or butter chicken, take your time and appreciate how different people, whether in Glasgow, London, or Delhi, have influenced what you’re eating. Instead of obsessing over who invented the dish, appreciate its flavour and celebrate all those who contributed to its creation.
The author is a chef and writer
