Secrets behind two of India’s most famous dishes
No one knows how many Indian restaurants exist worldwide; reportedly there are more than 5,000 in the United States alone. The exact number depends on how you define “Indian” and “restaurant.”
And most of them — from a little mom-andpop shop on the corner to the Michelin-starred Junoon in New York City — serve many of the same dishes, the standard repertoire that diners have come to expect. The menu just isn’t complete unless it contains skewered chicken tandoori in all its chile-hot, bright red glory and butter chicken with its rich sauce in which to dip your naan.
“My grandfather invented both,” says Monish Gujral, 52, sitting in his family’s flagship restaurant, Moti Mahal, in the middle of India’s capital, Delhi. “In fact, I often think that it is hard to imagine Indian food today without my grandfather’s inventions.” He sounds proud and thoughtful more than boasting.
Most dishes develop gradually, through a combination of natural conditions, slow adaptation of tradition and the occasional innovative twist. You’d be hardpressed to say when the dishes we today know as boeuf bourguignon and spaghetti Bolognese were invented; they just gradually came to be, as regional dishes promoted by a collective of home cooks.
But according to Gujral — and millions of Indians who have grown up with this story — tandoori chicken was invented in one sudden flash of inspiration by Gujral’s grandfather, Kundan Lal.
Lal grew up in a poor family in what is today Pakistan. He managed to work his way up from kitchen help to the senior cook at a restaurant in Peshawar in the years before independence. One day, in the late 1920s or early 1930s, he was asked to invent a dish that was a little lighter than the traditional, heavy regional specialties that were normally served at parties and other functions and celebrations.
His stroke of genius was this: How about using the tandoor? The cylindrical oven was common in the region, but it was normally used only for breads. “He marinated the chicken in yogurt, lime and spices and baked it in the tandoor. What came out was different than what anyone had ever tasted,” Gujral says.
The dish was a success that made Lal famous far outside his community, and after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, he moved to Delhi and opened Moti Mahal, where tandoori chicken is the signature dish.
To say that the restaurant is an institution is somewhat of an understatement. When the Shah of Iran visited India in the 1950s, he was told that to visit Delhi without eating at Moti Mahal was like visiting Agra without seeing the Taj Mahal. Since then, the place has only grown in significance with the increased interest in Indian food, domestically and globally.
As the inventor of the most popular dish from one of the world’s most populous countries, Lal could just lean back and enjoy the fame, fortune and popularity his invention had brought him and his restaurant. But it was not enough, according to family legend. He also invented what might very well be the second-mostpopular Indian dish.
“It was a direct consequence of the chicken tandoori,” Gujral says. “At that time, refrigeration was a big problem. The chicken had to be cooked the moment it arrived from the market. And if it was not eaten immediately, it could get terribly dry.”
So Lal invented a generous sauce, with spices, tomato, butter and cream, into which he placed pieces of tandoori chicken. “And that was the birth of butter chicken,” Gujral says, as both dishes arrive at our table, bright red and aromatic.
And thereby the circle was closed. What started as a request for a lighter, more fresh-tasting dish in a kitchen of many heavy stews became the heaviest and mightiest of them all.
The story of the sudden invention of such an iconic dish seems almost too much to be true. But according to Anubhav Sapra, street food explorer and founder of Delhi Food Walks and an expert on Delhi cooking, there is very little that contradicts it.
“Every mention of cooking chicken in a tandoor that I have seen comes from Peshawar and the North West Frontier Province, which is where Kundan Lal developed his recipe. And I have never seen a mention of tandoori chicken from the time before Kundan Lal. So it is quite probable that he actually invented it.”
Lal is unique in the importance that his culinary invention has had on Indian cuisine. But he was a part of a wider phenomenon, in which cooks from rural regions in what is today Pakistan came to Delhi and brought with them different cuisines, both traditional dishes and their own inventions.
“Take chole bhature — fried bread and chickpeas — a breakfast and lunch dish that is almost as popular as butter chicken, that also comes from Pakistan. But in that case we do not know the name of the person who brought it here,” Sapra says.
And that makes all the difference.
Today, Gujral is the custodian of the family tradition. He knows he will never be able to stop other restaurants from copying his grandfather’s recipes. Instead he has become an ambassador of Indian cuisine at large, with frequent TV appearances and several cookbooks, including “On the Butter Chicken Trail” and “Moti Mahal’s Tandoori Trail.” The Moti Mahal brand has grown to include more than 120 restaurants in India, plus franchises in the Middle East, Africa and New Zealand. The first U.S. restaurant is due to open in Boston in 2018 or 2019.
When Gujral learned that I did not have a tandoor, he offered to give me one; modern-day versions are made from old oil drums clad with clay on the inside; not terribly expensive, but cumbersome to bring home without challenging the airline’s baggage allowance.
Luckily, Gujral feels strongly that the lack of a tandoor should not stop anyone from making tandoori chicken at home. He recommends cooking the chicken at 500 degrees, to achieve some — albeit not all — of the browning and intense heat normally associated with the tandoor (in which the temperature can reach well over 800).
“If you have a decent domestic oven and follow my recipe, the result will be almost as good as the original, and much better than many of the copies you get at other restaurants,” he says.
Making it at home some weeks later, I could not agree more. I only wished I had remembered to turn on the kitchen fan.
Viestad is a farmer, writer and host of PBS’s “New Scandinavian Cooking.” He lives in Oslo, Norway.