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The chicken tikka masala story

posted on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 10:45 PM

Author: Sanjay Kumar, Brighton

The name of this enigma - Chicken Tikka Masala of course. The flagship dish of Britain’s newly acclaimed ‘national cuisine’ boasting a huge 14.8% of UK sales of the almost half a million curries consumed, on average, in the restaurants and homes every day of the year.

Chicken Tikka Masala, or CTM as it was affectionately dubbed by writer Colleen Grove in ‘Spice n Easy Magazine’ in November 1994, is one of those astonishing culinary fables that lend a touch of intrigue and excitement to an already exotic cuisine.

No curry chef seems to have produced any real evidence that he or she first invented the dish and it is commonly thought that its invention came about almost by accident. Journalist and restaurateur Iqbal Wahhab claims it was created when a Bangladeshi chef produced a dish of traditional chicken tikka only to be asked “oi! where’s my bloody gravy?”. The response was, supposedly, a can of Campbells cream of tomato soup and a few spices and the ‘masala’ element was born.

Top food writer Charles Campion refers to CTM as “a dish invented in London in the Seventies so that the ignorant could have gravy with their chicken tikka”. Several chefs have made claim to the invention of CTM but none with any evidence or witness support so the mystery will have to remain. The descendents of Sultan Ahmed Ansari, who owned the Taj Mahal in Glasgow claim he invented it in the 1950s but there is no other evidence of the dish at this early date or of the tandoor in Glasgow.

CTM was introduced to Waitrose by controversial Labour Party donor G.K.Noon in 1983 when he was still in the United States and by the end of the Millennium it was generally acknowledged as the most popular single dish in Britain.

For something that is so popular with the public and with the restaurateurs who make their living from it, chicken tikka masala is very much a Cinderella of culinary creations. Very few recipes for CTM appear in the plethora of Indian Cuisine cookbooks that have appeared over the last twenty years and Alan Davidson’s recent Oxford Companion to Food does not even consider it deserving of a listing. Indeed, such are the passions it generates in the industry, that many top Indian chefs refuse to cook or serve it due to its complete ‘lack of authenticity’.

However, exist it does and demanded it is, so just what is Chicken Tikka Masala? Tikkas are the bite-sized chunks you cut chicken into and these are marinated and cooked in the tandoor. The masala part is where things become difficult. Masala means spices but no exact recipe for these seems to exist. CTM can be yellow, red, brownish or even green and can be very creamy, a little creamy, chilli hot or quite mild. In restaurants it tends to be a creamy sauce - not too hot; a bit tomatoey; very smooth and, all too often, quite sweet and very red. In supermarkets, once you have by-passed the masses of CTM pizzas, filled pancakes, kievs, pies, microwave rolls and so on, you come to the chilled and frozen ready meals which range from mild onion gravy to saffron cream to velvety vermillion.

Created on the spur of the moment under pressure it may have been but, as a culinary concept, the dish, if not the name, already existed. As mentioned in another article, the earliest known recipe for meat in a spicy sauce with a bread appeared on tablets found near Babylon in Mesopotamia, written in cuniform text by the Sumerians from 1700 B.C.

Chicken tikka masala - 'ave it!

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