Chicken tikka masala Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Chicken tikka masala looks like a dish of India, yet it was born in Britain. It took shape over the second half of the twentieth century, broadly from the 1960s into the 1970s, in the Indian- and Bangladeshi-run curry houses of the United Kingdom. This British origin is reported by reference works and the press, and historical scholarship on Britain's Indian restaurants treats the dish as one of the curry house's staples.

The dish is a product of the accumulated craft of British curry houses. At its base is chicken tikka, pieces of chicken cooked in a tandoor oven, a technique carried over from India. Around this Indian roast chicken the cooks wrapped a mild, creamy tomato sauce, toned down to suit the British palate. It helps to picture it as a gentler, British-facing cousin of North Indian butter chicken, and indeed the two stand in exactly that sister-dish relationship, one softened for local tastes. Immigrant cooks kept nudging the spiced flavours of home toward what their regular customers liked, and out of that meeting halfway the dish emerged.

In writing, the earliest recorded use of the words 'tikka masala' that English dictionaries give is reportedly in the New York Times in 1975. But that marks a time the name reached print, not the first time the dish was cooked. The food itself was probably being served in British curry houses before then.

That it was born in Britain is solid; naming the one shop or one cook who made it first is another matter entirely. Around the same period, a number of restaurants were reportedly serving much the same thing side by side, and there is no way to pin down who was first. Chicken tikka masala is a dish whose place and era are visible while its very first plate stays hidden in the mist.

Whenever the origin of chicken tikka masala comes up, one anecdote is sure to follow. In 1971, at a restaurant called Shish Mahal in Glasgow, a cook is said to have reached for a can of Campbell's tomato soup to finish a customer's curry, and to have invented the dish on the spot: a single-inventor story with a single hero.

That story has already been set aside. It cannot be firmly corroborated, and even those around the restaurant have treated it as a fabrication, so as history it does not hold up. What settled the matter came in 2009. The city of Glasgow tried to register the dish as a local speciality under the European Union's protected-origin scheme. The bid failed, because far too many establishments claimed to have invented it. A 1998 curry restaurant guide recorded as many as forty-eight different ways of making it. That is hardly the picture you would expect if one cook had dreamed it up on a single day.

So what remains once the Glasgow story is set aside? Only the firm outline: that the dish was born in British curry houses in the later twentieth century, with no identifiable first plate. Reference works and the press take this view. In a 2009 article on Britain's Indian restaurants, the historian Elizabeth Buettner treats the dish as a curry-house staple and a hybrid dish, citing the 2001 speech in which Foreign Secretary Robin Cook called it 'a true British national dish', though she does not say where or when it was first made.

A few competing readings sit alongside this outline. Some trace the dish to North Indian butter chicken; others point to a similar recipe in Mrs Balbir Singh's 'Indian Cookery' of 1961 as a forerunner. Each lacks a decisive proof and simply stands next to the others. There has even been a claim that the dish reaches back five thousand years to ancient India, but that merely dresses it in a false, invented antiquity and rests on nothing.

The real interest of chicken tikka masala is not the answer to who made it first, but the conclusion that the question cannot be settled. Even after the glamorous single-inventor myth is dismissed, the origin stays open, and telling that honestly is what it means to do the dish justice.