Like many great dishes, the origins of chicken tikka masala (or CTM, as it's known to aficionados) is a subject of spicy debate. Ahmed Aslam Ali claims he invented the dish, which bears a strong resemblance to Punjabi butter chicken, in his Glasgow restaurant in the early 1970s after a customer complained that his chicken tikka was "a bit dry" a story repeated by innumerable others, often embellished with the detail that the original sauce was made from tinned tomato soup.
But as credit has also been given to everyone from the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, to Tony Blair's friend Sir Gulam Noon and Delhi street food vendors, it seems likely that we will never know who first came up with the idea of smothering tandoori chicken in a rich, tomatoey gravy. My suspicions are that chicken tikka masala is simply a British adaptation of the aforementioned murgh makhni Alfred Prasad of the Michelin-starred Tamarind restaurant in London reckons the only significant difference between the two is the onions in the CTM, while Indian-born food blogger Michelle Peters-Jones tells me it's the cream and fenugreek leaves in butter chicken that set it apart.
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