Thread by @aleyakassam

Here we go

A Chicken Tikka thread

A meandering unraveling

(Thinking about origins, adaptations, memories)

https://twitter.com/aleyakassam/status/1298531686897135618

In my search for information about the origins of Chicken Tikka, I had to wade through pages and pages of references to Chicken Tikka Masala

Some say that the Chicken Tikka Masala was named/coopted/has become the national dish of the UK (you won't find it anywhere else)

Some also say, that it was developed by mistake in a restaurant in Glasgow... a (I'm sure hywite) customer ordered Chicken Tikka, then complained that it was too dry.

So the chef poured a a can of Campbell's tomato soup over it, stirred it up & added a dollop of cream

And voila

The Chicken Tikka Masala was born

It sounds gross

Suffice to say ours does not have tomato soup

One origin story of Chicken Tikka goes back 5000 years to when the tandoor oven was invented. Indians had started rearing chickens

But apparently the then emperor of the Mughal dynasty, Babur got sick of choking on chicken bones so he ordered the chef to remove the bones

And so the resulting delicacy was Tikka (which refers to bits or pieces)

This is all from the wonderful piece from the Food Detectives Diary (my fricking broken phone won't let me paste links...I'll tweet it later)

My earliest memory of Chicken Tikka is watching my mum make the marinade

It's not one of those dishes you wake up and decide you want to eat today and you can just make it fwa fwa...the way my mum and her mum made it, you needed to let the flavours soak in at least a day before

First you have to make sure you have enough dahi - the homemade yoghurt - that is a staple of many Indian households

Every evening you take a little of yesterday's dahi, add milk, put it in a bakuli, cover with cloth & let it sit inside the unheated oven for the night

Woe befall you if you were the one who finished the last bit of dahi & didn't leave any to make the next bit

Also how cool that the dahi today could trace it's lineage to years before!

Then to the dahi, mum would add her other ingredients, then she'd massage the chicken with the marinade, wooing the chicken to welcome in the flavours into the meat

It would sit overnight

Then the next day the jiko would be lit

My granny used to baste the chicken with a little ghee as it sizzled on the jiko, the smoke caressing the flesh and the heat from the grill creating the most delicious lines of perfect char

We'd eat it with masala potatoes, homemade tamarind sauce, spicy yoghurt & onion rings

My mum tells me when she first got married, her and my dad's favourite treat meal was Chicken Tikka from Nargis Kapuri Paan House

They had a one bedroom flat with no fridge, no dining table...

But end of month, my dad would make a detour on the way home from work

And then they would sit on the floor, with a cardboard box as their table, and they'd eat this Chicken Tikka, sucking the meat off the bones and licking every bit of flavour off their fingers until it was all gone...in anticipation of the next month

At that point in their lives, without a fridge and without a place for a proper jiko, making it at home felt far away as a possibility

As soon as they could afford to, mum started making the tikka herself, at home, from the recipe she'd been given from her mum

(By the way there's now even a Nargis Kapuri Paan House in London...though the reviews don't look great 😬)

I love thinking about the ways that food travels from one place to another, the ways in which the places influence the way it is made, experienced, enjoyed

There's something so cool about the Chicken Tikka samosa for me....I think it's because I bite into it and this rush of memories come back

Anyways...that's the thread...issa meandering....if you'd like to try our chicken tikka samosa, order soon as we need time to marinate 😍

I think it's the best samosa we've made yet

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