A disputed birth

Where it came from is genuinely contested, and the confusion is part of the story. The most-told origin places it in Glasgow, where the Bangladeshi chef Ali Ahmed Aslam of the Shish Mahal restaurant is said to have improvised a sauce from a tin of condensed tomato soup and spices for a customer who complained his chicken was too dry. It is a lovely tale — and a shaky one. Other restaurateurs claimed the dish first, and the London restaurateur Iqbal Wahhab once admitted he had simply invented the famous soup-tin story "to entertain journalists." What food historians broadly agree on is less romantic but more telling: the dish "was most certainly invented in Britain, probably by a Bangladeshi chef," in the curry houses of the 1960s.

The Bangladeshi curry house

That detail — Bangladeshi — is the hidden history of the British "Indian" restaurant. For decades, the great majority of Britain's Indian restaurants were run not by Indians but by Bangladeshis, largely from the Sylhet region. London's Veeraswamy, opened in 1926, is the oldest surviving Indian restaurant in the country; from 1968, curry houses began installing Punjabi-style tandoor ovens, adding the chargrilled chicken tikka and naan that the masala sauce would later smother. The "Indian" on the British high street was, in truth, a pan-subcontinental diaspora creation.

A national dish, declared

By 2001 the dish had travelled so far into British life that the Foreign Secretary made it a metaphor for the country itself. Robin Cook declared chicken tikka masala "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." By 2010 it was the most popular order in British curry houses; for years it ranked among the best-selling supermarket ready meals in the land.

Authenticity, and its discontents

Not everyone celebrated. Critics — "both middle-class white Britons and better-off South Asians," as one account puts it — mocked the dish as inauthentic, a watered-down fantasy of Indian cooking. The food scholar Raghavan Iyer noted that the authentic tikka had no sauce at all; the gravy was the British addition. But that is exactly the point of diaspora food: authenticity is the wrong test. Chicken tikka masala is not bad Indian food. It is good British-Indian food — a genuine new cuisine, born of migration, that "took on a personality of its own."

That is the lens this series brings to the diaspora plate, from Trinidad's doubles to South Africa's bunny chow: not what's authentic, but what migration cooked up when an old kitchen met a new country.

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Next in the series: Trinidad, where the roti and the doubles became a national street food.

Sources: Wikipedia: Chicken tikka masala.