Chicken tikka masala: why Britain’s best Indian chefs respect the hybrid dish, even if they won’t put it on their menus
- Asma Khan of top British Indian restaurant Darjeeling Express talks about her initial resistance to the hybrid dish and its place in the UK’s culinary history
- Fellow chef Samir Tharkar, like Khan, wouldn’t put it on his menus, but acknowledges the role the dish had in making Britons fall in love with Indian flavours
Asma Khan has a vivid memory of the first time she encountered chicken tikka masala (CTM), the b*****d child of Indian cooking and British taste. It was in 1992, and she had just arrived in the great English university town of Cambridge, where her husband was studying law.
A professor invited the young couple to dinner at an Indian restaurant, where he ordered the dish, a staple of curry houses across Britain.
“I was confused,” says Khan of the chunks of mildly spiced chicken, roasted, then stewed in tomatoes and cream. “I thought I knew about Indian food, but this was completely unfamiliar. I honestly thought someone in the kitchen had made a mistake.”
In Indian cooking, a tikka is ready to eat when roasted. Stewing it is superfluous, and doing that in tomatoes and cream is downright silly.
Samir Tharkar, born and raised in the UK, has a very different recollection of his first experience of CTM, as the dish is commonly known in the country of its creation.
