Britain's curry-house standard: yoghurt-marinated chicken charred hard, then folded into a tomato and cream gravy
Origin: Glasgow & Britain
From the journey of Tomato.
The dish is a gravy with something in it, and the gravy is tomato. Tinned tomatoes and tomato purée cooked down with onion until the oil separates, softened with cream and butter, coloured with Kashmiri chilli, and finished with crushed dried fenugreek leaf: that base is what a British curry house means by masala, and the chicken is a separate operation folded in at the end. Cooking the two apart is the point rather than a shortcut, since the chicken is marinated in spiced yoghurt and charred hard first, and it is the burnt edges that keep it from disappearing into the sauce. Who made it first is genuinely contested, and the atlas does not award it. The best-known claim belongs to Ali Ahmed Aslam of the Shish Mahal in Glasgow, who said that in the early 1970s a customer sent back a dry chicken tikka and that he improvised a sauce from a tin of condensed tomato soup, cream, and spices; the restaurant has made the claim consistently for decades, and in 2009 Mohammad Sarwar, then the Member of Parliament for Glasgow Central, tabled a Commons motion seeking European protected origin status for the city's version. The bid went nowhere. Against it, several food writers point out that the dish is in substance a lightly altered murgh makhani, the Delhi butter chicken developed at the Moti Mahal in the 1940s and 1950s, and that curry-house kitchens across Britain arrived at very similar sauces independently because they were working from the same ingredients and the same customers. Both accounts describe something real. Neither can be proved. What is not in dispute is who was cooking. The overwhelming majority of Britain's Bangladeshi restaurateurs trace to Sylhet, in the north-east of the country, whose men had worked as lascars in British merchant shipping since the eighteenth century; many left their ships in London and the northern ports, and the post-war catering trade grew out of those networks. By the 1970s the standard British curry house was Sylheti-run and worked on a system: one large pot of onion, tomato, and spice reduced in the morning, then split and finished to order in a few minutes with whatever the customer had asked for. That is why so many dishes on a British curry-house menu taste like cousins. Chicken tikka masala is the mildest, richest, and most popular of them. On 19 April 2001 Robin Cook, then Foreign Secretary, told the Social Market Foundation that chicken tikka masala was a true British national dish, not merely because it was the most popular but because it was a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts outside influences. The line was repeated everywhere and is still repeated, and the dish it describes is one almost nobody in South Asia has ever ordered.
Use thigh rather than breast: the grill needed to char the outside will dry breast meat before the sauce ever reaches it. Kashmiri chilli powder is what gives the sauce its colour without much heat, and ordinary chilli powder substituted at the same quantity will make the dish far hotter than it should be; use half as much and accept a paler sauce. Cook the tomato until the oil separates, since this is the difference between a curry-house sauce and a sharp one. The dried fenugreek leaf goes in at the very end and off the heat, because it is an aroma rather than a flavour and boiling it away wastes it.
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