The Chicken Tikka Masala Story Reading Answers

The Chicken Tikka Masala Story

Organisers of National Curry Week claim that if all the portions sold in one year in the UK were stacked on top of each other they would constitute a tikka tower 2,770 times taller than the Greenwich Millennium Dome and yet in an article in The Daily Telegraph in November 1999, journalist Amit Roy referred to it as “a dish which does not exist in Indian cuisine”. So the question is, “is it a genuine Indian dish or isn’t it?” The name of this enigma? Chicken Tikka Masala: the flagship dish of Britain’s newly acclaimed ‘national cuisine’, boasting a huge 14.6% of the sales of the almost half a million curries consumed, on average, in the restaurants and homes of the United Kingdom 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 culinary fables that lend a touch of intrigue and excitement to an already exotic cuisine.

Amit Roy was quite correct to observe that the dish does not hail from India and that it was specifically created to appeal to the British palate by some very astute restaurateurs. This much is not in doubt, but when one moves on to the history of the dish, fact becomes fiction and depends on just who one talks to. No ‘Indian’ 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 “Where’s my gravy?” The response was, supposedly, a can of 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 claims to the invention of CTM, but none with any evidence or witness support so the mystery will have to remain. The descendants 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. 
The tandoor, which boosted tikka sales, had not even arrived in Britain at that time, having only been introduced to the first Indian restaurant, Moti Mahal in New Delhi in 1948. In fact, this can be seen as the birth of CTM in its original form of Butter Chicken. Lala Kundan Lal Gujral first set up in Peshawar in 1920 but came to Delhi in 1947 to set up Moti Mahal. He worked with a local man to produce the first restaurant version of the tandoor and invented a tandoori spice mix for tandoori chicken - ground coriander seeds, black pepper and mild red pepper. Called Murg Makhani in Hindi, Butter Chicken originated in the 1950s at the Moti Mahal restaurant in Old Delhi. Famed for its Tandoori Chicken, the cooks there used to recycle the leftover chicken juices in the marinade trays by adding butter and tomato. This sauce was then tossed around with the tandoor-cooked chicken pieces and presto - Butter Chicken was ready! The leftover dish appealed to Delhites and was quickly lapped up by the rest of the world.

So impressed was India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru by Kundan Lal's dishes that Moti Mahal became a permanent fixture in all his state banquets. Legend has it that when former Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev was asked what he liked about India, he replied, ''Taj Mahal and Moti Mahal''. When the Shah of Iran came on a state visit to India, the Indian Education Minister Maulana Azad told him that coming to Delhi without eating at Moti Mahal was like going to Agra and not seeing the Taj Mahal.
Top restaurateur Amin Ali, owner of The Red Fort and Soho Spice in London’s Soho, remembers serving CTM when he first arrived in London in 1974. A lowly waiter at the time he remembers wondering just what the dish was. CTM was introduced to Waitrose by 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 chefs refuse to cook or serve it due to its complete ‘lack of authenticity’.
Mridula Baljekar is one of the few cookery writers to have included CTM in her bestselling ‘Complete Indian Cookbook’ (1993) including food colouring and tomato puree, as well as double cream and almonds. Chef Mohammed Moneer introduces yet another ingredient with half a cup of coconut milk instead of cream.

Chicken Tikka Masala was most certainly invented in Britain, probably by a Bangladeshi chef, and is so popular it is even being served in some hotel restaurants in India and Bangladesh. It does not come from the Raj or the kitchens of the Moghul Emperors, but millions of people enjoy it every year, and perhaps that is all the pedigree it needs!

Questions 1 - 8

Look at the following statements (Questions 1-8) and the list of people, A - I, below.

Match each statement with the correct person.

Write the correct letter, A-I, as your answer.

1 He asserts that the dish was born as a quick response to a customer’s demand.
2 He presented an analogy between a restaurant and a well-known monument.
3 He noted that Chicken Tikka Masala was made to suit the British taste. 
4 He replaced one of the ingredients.
5 He used the acronym CTM in his article.
6 He served the dish without having any knowledge about it.
7 He has not mentioned Chicken Tikka Masala in his book.
8 He introduced Chicken Tikka Masala to Waitrose.

List of People

A Colleen Grove
B Amit Roy
C Iqbal Wahhab
D Charles Champion
E Nikita Kruschev
F Maulana Azad
G Amin Ali
H G K Noon
I Alan Davidson
J Mohammed Moneer

1.B

Explanation: Paragraph 4 - As iron-oxidising bacteria exist even today, these findings underline the achievement of such microorganisms. “They have been around for 3.8 billion years at least,” says, Dominic Papineau, the main author from UCL.

2.D

Explanation: Paragraph 5 - According to the research team, this finding strengthens the theory that life appeared and diversified quickly on Earth.

3.A

Explanation: Paragraph 5 - “If we look at similar old rocks from Mars and we can’t find evidence of life, then this certainly may point to the fact that Earth may be a very special exception and life might just have arisen on Earth,” remarks Dodd.

4.C

Explanation: Paragraph 6 - An expert on ancient fossil bacteria, Frances Westall, ... She says, “The thing that bothers me most about these structures is the fact that they all seem to be extremely oriented. They are parallel to each other, and microbes don’t grow parallel to each other.”

5.A

Explanation: Paragraph 4 - Matthew Dodd from University College, London who is the leading author of the research says, “If these rocks do indeed turn out to be 4.28 billion years old, then we are talking about the origins of life developing very soon after the oceans formed 4.4 billion years ago.”