A Mughal emperor fears chicken bones and a Glasgow bus driver makes a complaint

It’s a peculiar thing that, when sifting through ‘that great dust heap called “history”’, as the politician and author Augustine Birrell put it, we may sometimes come across incidents whose veracity can be counted upon more surely than that of episodes that hail from much more recent times. For example, take the development of one of Britain’s favourite dishes.

There are two incidents, divided by a gulf five millennia wide, that are said to have combined to create chicken tikka masala. To visit the first of them, we must go back in time to the early 16th century and the Mughal Empire in south Asia. To eavesdrop on the latter event, so conventional wisdom tells us, we need travel back only as far as 1960s Glasgow.

The tandoor oven was first used in what is now northern India and Pakistan around 5,000 years ago. Made of clay and using charcoal as fuel, it gave food a distinctive flavour. Chicken meat cooked in a tandoor with plenty of spices was a firm favourite five centuries ago in the Mughal Empire, which had expanded to include much of India around 1525. The first emperor, a descendant of Tamerlane called Babur, was a fan of ‘tandoori chicken’. What he was not so keen on were chicken bones, which were just the sort of thing that a world leader might choke on and die of (in that respect they were the medieval equivalent of the pretzel that nearly did for George W. Bush). One day Babur sent a command to his cooks that all the bones should be extracted before the chicken was placed in the oven. This could not be done without dividing the meat into much smaller pieces. The new dish of boneless morsels was called joleh in Persian, or tikka in Punjabi, and quickly became a firm favourite across the Mughal Empire. At some later point, cooks began to marinate the chicken in yoghurt before it was roasted in the tandoor.

Fast-forward to an Indian restaurant in Glasgow sometime in the 1960s. The story goes that a Scottish customer calls the waiter over to complain about his food. His chicken tikka, he cavils, is too dry for his taste. The waiter takes his plate back to the kitchen and in a flash of inspiration – or perhaps annoyance at this philistine’s lack of appreciation for the dish – he pours some tomato soup into the sauce. The diner declares himself more than satisfied with the revised version of his order and the rest is history.

One restaurant actually lays claim to being the very locale in which the incident is supposed to have happened. According to one Asif Ali, it occurred not in the ’60s but in 1971 at the Shish Mahal in Glasgow, owned by his Pakistani father, Ali Ahmed Aslam. The customer in question was apparently a bus driver, and the proprietor was suffering from a stomach ulcer and was thus eating some Campbell’s tomato soup at the time of the complaint. Looking down at his bowl, Ali is said to have suggested that some tomato soup be added to the rejected dish in order to make it more moist. Before long ‘chicken tikka masala’ (‘masala’ being a reference to the spicy sauce) was added to the menu as a sop to the British palate.

Regrettably, this is not the sole tale told about the genesis of the dish. Some claim that the tomato had already been added during Britain’s occupation of India in order to soften the impact of the spices, to which the colonialists were unaccustomed. Owners of the Karim Hotel in Delhi maintain that the recipe has been known to its chefs since the mid-19th century. The city’s famous Moti Mahal restaurant also lays claim to the dish’s creation (dating it back to the 1950s). There’s also a possibility that the dish is a derivation of a recipe for shahi chicken masala published in London in 1961 in a book entitled Mrs Balbir Singh’s Indian Cookery.

Whoever has the prior claim to the addition of tomato to the dish, it would seem that the incident at the Shish Mahal was the one that set chicken tikka masala on its way to fame. We can also ascribe the ‘tikka’ part to one man’s fear of death by chicken bone. Since that man single-handedly conquered vast swathes of Indian territory, establishing an empire that would last over 300 years after his death, it’s quite impressive that a single order with regard to his cuisine should have made such an impact on modern Britain, where chicken tikka masala now accounts for about 15 per cent of all curries prepared in the land.

Its place in the national diet was affirmed in 2001 by the late Robin Cook, the British foreign secretary of the day. ‘Chicken tikka masala is now a true British national dish,’ he proclaimed, ‘not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences.’ As Britons become more insular and more opposed to immigration, chicken tikka masala may yet prove to be a perfect illustration of the way we were rather than the way we are.