Chicken tikka masala

Last updated

Chicken tikka masala
Chicken tikka masala.jpg
Course Main course
Place of origin United Kingdom
Main ingredientsChicken, yogurt, tomato, onion
  • Wikibooks-logo-en-noslogan.svg Cookbook: Chicken tikka masala
  •   Commons-logo.svg Media: Chicken tikka masala

Chicken tikka masala is a curry consisting of roasted marinated chicken pieces (chicken tikka) in a creamy spiced sauce (masala). The origins of the dish are debated, with many believing it was created by South Asian cooks in Britain, possibly in Glasgow, Scotland. It is offered at restaurants around the world and is similar to butter chicken.

Contents

It is one of the most popular dishes in Britain, and in 2001 was described by the British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook as "a true British national dish". [1]

Composition

Chicken tikka masala is a brightly coloured curry composed of chicken tikka, boneless chunks of chicken marinated in spices (masala) and yoghurt, roasted in an oven, and served in a creamy sauce. [2] [3] [4] A tomato and coriander leaf sauce is common, but there is no standard recipe: a 1998 survey in Britain found that among 48 recipes, the only common ingredient was chicken. [4] [5] It is served as a main course, often with rice or flatbread. [6] Chicken tikka masala is similar to butter chicken, both in the method of creation and appearance. [7]

Origins

Evolution of chicken tikka masala. Chicken tikka was created in Mughal India using Persian marinading of meat in yoghurt and Central Asian tandoor roasting with Indian spices. In 20th century Britain, a sauce was added to meet the British liking for gravy with meat. The dish has evolved further to a taco filling in the US, and to a pizza topping in India. Evolution of Chicken Tikka Masala.svg
Evolution of chicken tikka masala. Chicken tikka was created in Mughal India using Persian marinading of meat in yoghurt and Central Asian tandoor roasting with Indian spices. In 20th century Britain, a sauce was added to meet the British liking for gravy with meat. The dish has evolved further to a taco filling in the US, and to a pizza topping in India.


Adapted from an Indian dish

Chicken tikka masala served with rice Chicken Tikka Masala KellySue.JPG
Chicken tikka masala served with rice

The origin of chicken tikka masala is not certain, but many sources attribute it to the South Asian community in Great Britain. [3] [12] [13] [14] It has been suggested that the dish is derived from butter chicken, a popular dish in the northern Indian subcontinent. The Multicultural Handbook of Food, Nutrition and Dietetics credits its creation to Bangladeshi migrant chefs in Britain in the 1960s, who at that time ran most of Britain's Indian restaurants. They developed several new inauthentic "Indian" dishes. [15] Rahul Verma, a food critic for The Hindu , [16] claimed that the dish has its origins in the Punjab region. [17]

Created in Glasgow

Another claim is that the dish originated in a restaurant in Glasgow, Scotland. [2] [18] This version recounts how a British Pakistani chef, Ali Ahmed Aslam, proprietor of the Shish Mahal restaurant in Glasgow from the 1960s, invented chicken tikka masala by improvising a sauce made from a tin of condensed tomato soup, and spices, to please a customer who wanted a sauce to accompany the dry chicken tikka meat. [19] [9] [13] [20]

The historians of ethnic food Peter and Colleen Grove discuss several claims about the origin of the dish. Peter Grove challenged the claim that Aslam had created the dish, on the grounds that the dish existed several years before his restaurant opened. Specifically, Sultan Ahmed Ansari, owner of Glasgow's Taj Mahal restaurant, stated that he had created the dish in the 1950s. [21]

Alternative claims

The London restaurant owner Iqbal Wahhab claims that he and Peter Grove fabricated the story of a chef using Campbell's tomato soup to create chicken tikka masala "to entertain journalists", and that in particular the use of the soup was "completely made up". [22] [23] [24] The British Indian businessman Gulam Noon is among the people who helped to popularise the dish, though he was not its inventor; he ran food product companies in Southall, in the west of London. [25]

The historians of ethnic food Peter and Colleen Grove discuss several claims about the origin of the dish, concluding that it "was most certainly invented in Britain, probably by a Bangladeshi chef." [26] They suggest that "the shape of things to come may have been a recipe for Shahi Chicken Masala in Mrs Balbir Singh's Indian Cookery published in 1961." [26] [27] Mrs Balbir Singh's recipe calls for onions fried in oil, with garlic, ginger, masala spices and tomatoes for the frying mixture for the chicken; cream, ground almonds, and yoghurt are added later in the cooking. [28]

Popularity

Chicken tikka masala is served in restaurants around the world. [29] By 2010, it was the most popular dish in British curry houses. [4] According to a 2012 survey of 2,000 people in Britain, it was the country's second-most popular foreign dish to cook, after Chinese stir fry. [30] The Oxford Companion to Food traces this popularity to 1983, when supermarkets began selling the dish as a chilled meal; [31] and as of 2016 it was the third most popular ready meal sold in UK supermarkets. [32] In 2001, the British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook mentioned the dish in a speech acclaiming the benefits of Britain's multiculturalism, declaring:

Chicken tikka masala is now a true British 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. Chicken tikka is an Indian dish. The masala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy. [1] [33] [22] [34]

This invocation of chicken tikka masala as a national dish and descriptions of its origin as British have been criticised by some Indian chefs and commentators as disrespectful to Indian cuisine, viewing the dish as a "cognate of curries originating in South Asia" appropriated by "White British colonialists". [35] Such characterizations have in turn been criticised as relying on notions that racial groups can own recipes. [35] In 2009, efforts by Scottish parliamentarian Mohammed Sarwar to gain the Glasgow dish protected designation of origin status were unsuccessful. [32]

In the United States, chicken tikka masala has in addition been sold as a taco filling by food trucks and as a pizza topping. [10] [36] In India, it has been seen as a novelty dish, [37] and it has been used as a pizza topping by an Indian fast food chain. [11]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Cook, Robin (19 April 2001). "Robin Cook's chicken tikka masala speech: Extracts from a speech by the foreign secretary to the Social Market Foundation in London". The Guardian .
  2. 1 2 Lloyd, J. and Mitchinson, J. The Book of General Ignorance . Faber & Faber, 2006
  3. 1 2 Siciliano-Rosen, Laura; Rogers, Kara. "Chicken tikka masala". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 28 December 2020.
  4. 1 2 3 Jackson, Peter (2010). "A Cultural Politics of Curry: The Transnational Spaces of Contemporary Commodity Culture". Hybrid Cultures—Nervous States: Britain and Germany in a (Post)Colonial World. Amsterdam: Rodopi BV. p. 172. ISBN   978-9042032286 . Retrieved 3 June 2014.
  5. ↑ Webb, Andrew (2011). Food Britannia. Random House. p. 177. ISBN   978-1847946232 . Retrieved 3 June 2014.
  6. ↑ "What's in your Indian takeaway?" (PDF). Safe Food. September 2015. ISBN   978-1-905767-57-1 . Retrieved 15 December 2025. All three main courses provided high amounts of the adult GDA for salt: chicken jalfrezi, 86%; chicken tikka masala, 79%; and chicken korma, 50% ... Main-course portion sizes were found to provide enough for two people. The average portion of chicken tikka masala in this survey was 523g.
  7. ↑ Irwin, Heather (September 2019). "A Butter Chicken Vs. Tikka Masala Showdown at Cumin in Santa Rosa". Sonoma Magazine . Retrieved 11 April 2021.
  8. ↑ Collingham 2006, p. 232.
  9. 1 2 Godeau, Lucie (2 August 2009). "Chicken tikka masala claims its origins in Scotland". The Sydney Morning Herald . Agence France Presse . Retrieved 19 May 2017. 'Chicken tikka masala was invented in this restaurant, we used to make chicken tikka, and one day a customer said, "I'd take some sauce with that, this is a bit dry",' said Ahmed Aslam Ali, 64, founder of Shish Mahal. 'We thought we'd better cook the chicken with some sauce. So from here we cooked chicken tikka with the sauce that contains yogurt, cream, spices'.
  10. 1 2 Glenn, Jane K. (2022). The joy of eating: a guide to food in modern pop culture. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 238. ISBN   978-1-4408-6210-6. OCLC   1264746520.
  11. 1 2 Sen, Colleen Taylor (2004). Food Culture in India. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 137. ISBN   0-313-32487-5.
  12. ↑ Dutt, Vijay (21 October 2007). "60 years of Chicken Tikka Masala". Hindustan Times . Retrieved 13 December 2021.
  13. 1 2 Ghosh, Bobby (19 January 2023). "How I Learned to Stop Hating and Respect Chicken Tikka Masala". Bloomberg News . Retrieved 26 February 2023.
  14. ↑ Taylor, Emma. "Most people have no clue chicken tikka masala isn't an Indian dish, according to a top Indian chef". Insider. Retrieved 13 December 2021.
  15. ↑ Thaker, Aruna; Barton, Arlene (2012). Multicultural Handbook of Food, Nutrition and Dietetics. John Wiley & Sons. p. 74. ISBN   9781405173582.
  16. ↑ "Author profile: Rahul Verma". The Hindu. Retrieved 13 May 2017.
  17. ↑ Nelson, Dean; Andrabi, Jalees (4 August 2009). "Chicken tikka masala debate grows as Indian chefs reprimand Scottish MPs over culinary origins". The Daily Telegraph . London. Retrieved 28 April 2010. Rahul Verma, Delhi's most authoritative expert on street food, said he first tasted the dish in 1971 and that its origins were in Punjab. "It's basically a Punjabi dish not more than 40-50 years old and must be an accidental discovery which has had periodical improvisations"
  18. ↑ "From Charles Mackintosh's waterproof to Dolly the sheep: 43 innovations Scotland has given the world". The Independent. 30 December 2016.
  19. ↑ "Glasgow 'invented' Tikka Masala". BBC News . 21 July 2009. Retrieved 19 May 2017. Mr Sarwar claimed the dish owed its origins to the culinary skills of Ali Ahmed Aslam, proprietor from 1964 of the Shish Mahal restaurant in Park Road in the west end of the city. He is said to have prepared a sauce using spices soaked in a tin of condensed tomato soup after a customer said his meal was too dry.
  20. ↑ "Glaswegian who 'invented' chicken tikka masala dies". BBC News. 22 December 2022.
  21. ↑ Hay, Mark (5 May 2014). "Who Owns Chicken Tikka Masala?". Roads & Kingdoms. Retrieved 9 January 2023. 'Many chefs have claimed to have 'invented' chicken tikka masala, but it was certainly not Ali Ahmed Aslam of Shish Mahal,' says Grove. 'The restaurant did not open until the '60s and there was already a Glasgow claimant in the shape of Sultan Ahmed Ansari, who owned Taj Mahal and claimed to have invented it in the late '50s.'
  22. 1 2 Monroe, Jo (September 2005). Star of India: The Spicy Adventures of Curry. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 135–137. ISBN   978-0-470-09188-3 . Retrieved 29 November 2021. An enterprising chef then looked around for something to make a sauce from and found a tin of Campbell's condensed tomato soup. Hey presto! A legend had been born. The problem with this story is that — despite its status as a curry legend — it is completely invented. Cinnamon Club founder Iqbal Wahhab ...claims to have originated the story to entertain journalists in the days when he handled the marketing for several restaurants. 'That thing about the Campbell's soup was completely made up,' he confessed
  23. ↑ "Curry myths". Iqbal Wahhab. 5 December 2011. Archived from the original on 9 January 2023. Retrieved 9 January 2023.
  24. ↑ Gallacher, Stevie (9 June 2019). "Chicken Faker Masala: Restaurant boss admits inventing Scottish claim to famous dish". The Sunday Post . Retrieved 9 January 2023.
  25. ↑ "Lord Noon, businessman - obituary". The Daily Telegraph . 27 October 2015. Retrieved 27 October 2015.
  26. 1 2 Grove, Peter; Grove, Colleen (2008). "Is It or Isn't It? (The Chicken Tikka Masala Story)". Menu Magazine. Archived from the original on 27 November 2016. Retrieved 19 May 2017.
  27. ↑ Singh, Balbir (1961). Mrs Balbir Singh's Indian Cookery. Mills & Boon.
  28. ↑ Singh, Balbir. "Mrs Balbir Singh's Shahi Chicken Masala (The Original Chicken Tikka Masala?)". Mrs Balbir Singh . Retrieved 30 November 2025.
  29. ↑ Kumar, Rakesh (24 February 2007). "Tastes that travel". The Hindu . Chennai, India. Archived from the original on 29 June 2021. Retrieved 19 May 2017.
  30. ↑ "Stir-fry now Britain's most popular foreign dish". Daily Mirror . 21 January 2012.
  31. ↑ Davidson, Alan (2014). The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. Tikka. ISBN   9780199677337.
  32. 1 2 Williams, Victoria (2024). Food Cultures of Great Britain: Cuisine, Customs, and Issues. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 88–89. ISBN   978-1-4408-7741-4.
  33. ↑ Mannur, Anita (2009). Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture. Temple University Press. p. 3. ISBN   978-1-4399-0077-2.
  34. ↑ Collingham, Elizabeth M. (2006). Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors . Oxford University Press. pp.  2–12. ISBN   0-19-517241-8.
  35. 1 2 McBride III, Lee A. (2018). "Racial Imperialism and Food Traditions". In Barnhill, Anne; Budolfson, Mark; Doggett, Tyler (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics. Oxford University Press. pp. 338–339. ISBN   978-0-19-937226-3.
  36. ↑ Vinh, Tan (19 August 2021). "Tandoori chicken on pizza? Our food critic explores Indian pizza options around Greater Seattle to pick his top 3". The Seattle Times . Retrieved 29 December 2025.
  37. ↑ Basu, Shrabani (2003). Curry: the Story of the Nation's Favourite Dish. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing. p. xiii. ISBN   0-7509-3374-7.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.