Glasgow / South Asian diaspora
Chicken Tikka Masala
Tandoor-grilled chicken in a tomato-cream sauce with garam masala and fenugreek — the British-Bangladeshi invention that became Britain's most-eaten dish.
British by birth, Indian by descent.
Chicken tikka — yogurt-marinated chunks of boneless chicken grilled in a tandoor — is unambiguously a Punjabi dish. Chicken tikka masala, the same chicken folded into a creamy tomato-and-garam-masala sauce, is unambiguously a British invention. The most-cited origin story is the Shish Mahal in Glasgow in the 1970s, where a customer is said to have complained the chicken tikka was too dry and a Bangladeshi cook improvised a sauce from tomato soup, cream, and garam masala. The story is probably embroidered. The dish is real.
4 · Plate
Glasgow / South Asian diaspora
Chicken Tikka Masala
Tandoor-grilled chicken in a tomato-cream sauce with garam masala and fenugreek — the British-Bangladeshi invention that became Britain's most-eaten dish.
The dish a former British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, used to define modern British identity in a 2001 speech (“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”). The figure most often quoted — 23 million plates served weekly across the UK — is impossible to verify and probably softened over the years, but the dish’s status as the British curry-house default is real.
Indian critics have a complicated relationship with the dish. It’s often described as not-really-Indian, but its descent is clearly South Asian — Bangladeshi cooks adapting Punjabi chicken tikka to British palates with the kitchen tools available. The dish is a diaspora invention rather than an Indian one; it lives in the same family as Anglo-Indian kedgeree and mulligatawny — born of contact, recognisably neither parent.
Naan or basmati, not both.
British restaurant tradition serves it with basmati rice on one side and naan on the other, and most diners use both at once. The cleaner pairing is one or the other — naan to sop, rice to balance — not both at once. A side of *raita* if the sauce is hot, a slice of lemon if it's dull.