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Chicken tikka masala
Robin Cook announced chicken tikka masala as the new national dish of Great Britain. Food critics immediately responded by condemning it as a British invention. Chicken tikka masala, they sneered, was not a shining example of British multiculturalism but a demonstration of the British facility for reducing all foreign foods to their most unappetizing and inedible forms. Rathar than the inspired invention of an enterprising Indian chef, this offensive dish was dismissed as the result of an ignorant customer's complaint that his chicken tikka was too dry. When the chef whipped together a can of Campbell's tomato soup, some cream, and a few spices to provide a gravy for the offending chicken, he produced a mongrel dish of which, to their shame, Britons now eat at least 18 tons a week.
That is from Lizzie Collingham's Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, an excellent look at the history of Indian food, and especially the Persian origins of many Indian dishes.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 18, 2006 at 07:22 AM in Food and Drink | Permalink
Comments
But it is delicious!
Posted by: goodness_of_fit at Aug 18, 2006 10:07:15 AM
It's "fusion" if you like it, a "mongrel dish" if you don't.
Posted by: mschrist at Aug 18, 2006 10:25:35 AM
I am not able to read the comments that have been
posted, but one problem with this huffing and puffing
is that curry is not a single formula. It varies
enormously and widely across different regions of India.
Same goes for tikka. That tikka has been modified in
UK is not a big deal. The same thing has been going on
with respect to Chinese cuisine around the world; you
will not find chop suey in China. Indeed, Chinese cuisine
has been modified in India itself. I find it hard to get
very worked up about this alleged degradation of cuisine
by the former imperialists.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Aug 18, 2006 10:52:00 AM
A wonderful British-Hungarian dish from my undergraduate days: curried spaghetti and rice with chips.
Posted by: dearieme at Aug 18, 2006 11:33:57 AM
mschrist: nicely put.
Here are a couple more inauthentic national dishes: American pizza and Japanese
curry raisu. And I have seen, and eaten, curry raisu flavored pizza.
Posted by: Acad Ronin at Aug 18, 2006 12:12:11 PM
I am an Australian of British decent via 2 and 3 generations of Indian Colonialists. This by no means makes me an expert! However, having shown an interest in food from a very early age, I recall my Grandmother telling me of how many Indian dishes were bastardised at the whim of the British settlers, and that those same dishes where once again bastardised whence they were brought to Australia. It is nothing new, as the previous comments have it. Vindaloo after all is a dish bastardised by the Goan populus from a Portuguese dish. Almost all of the most beloved dishes in the world are a combination of a favourite local cooking style or ingredient and a foreign cooking style or ingredient. The famous ragu a la Bolognese? Where did the tomatoes come from in this dish? The America's of course!
For some reason many pass off so-called "fusion-food" as a fad nowadays. It has always been with us. Enjoy!
Posted by: Clinton at Aug 18, 2006 12:18:51 PM
Creative destruction never tasted soooo delicious.
Posted by: Josh at Aug 18, 2006 2:18:05 PM
When I came to the US from Mexico, somebody told me that He liked burritos, fajitas and margaritas, which I had never tasted before. My hometown is in a tequila producing area and I came to know about the existance of margaritas by watching american movies.
Even if the names are in spanish and some of the ingredients are those used in mexican food, the taste is radically different.
In Puerto Vallarta Mexico, I noticed that there were restaurants for both types of mexican food. Booth types claim to be mexican restaurants, but they give clues to each type of customer two separate themselves.
Posted by: Ramon at Aug 18, 2006 2:28:09 PM
"Robin Cook announced chicken tikka masala as the new national dish of Great Britain."
Ok.
"Food critics immediately responded by condemning it as a British invention."
Wha? It was "announced as the new national dish of Great Britain" not India. Why are they condemning a British national dish for being invented in Britain? Hunh? Isn't that like condemning the American "national pastime" for being invented in America? Why, because it differs from cricket?
But this is good:
"this offensive dish was dismissed as the result of an ignorant customer's complaint that his chicken tikka was too dry."
And in similar fashion, in Saratoga Springs a 150 odd years ago, the potato chip was born from a customer's complaints and a chef improvising an impromptu revenge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_chip
Posted by: k hagen at Aug 18, 2006 8:33:33 PM
A wonderful British-Hungarian dish from my undergraduate days: curried spaghetti and rice with chips.
Posted by: dearieme at Aug 18, 2006 11:33:57 AM
As a Hungarian, let me be the first to tell you -- there is nothing Hungarian about "curried spaghetti and rice with chips". Seriously.
The goulash you see in countries other than Hungary is at least faintly Hungarian, the main difference is in Hungary goulash (gulyásleves) is a soup, not a stew (pörkölt).
But to reiterate: curried spaghetti and rice with chips has nothing Hungarian about it.
Posted by: Varangy at Aug 18, 2006 9:46:21 PM
Ptarmigan tikka masala sounds better.
http://www.lims.demon.co.uk/clean16.htm, the last one ;-)
Posted by: Giedrius at Aug 19, 2006 5:37:26 AM
Giedrus: how wrong you are. It was served in "George's Hungarian Restaurant". When trade was quiet, George himself would erupt into the room, playing his accordion and singing. He was an authentic Magyar and devoted his life to preparing young men to sally forth for a beer or eight. Bless him.
Posted by: dearieme at Aug 19, 2006 12:41:45 PM
What the book manages to do well is to show how our notions of national and/or cultural boundaries as expressed through food are totally bogus. There has been movement of peoples, foods, and recipes throughout history. The problem with the curry comment initially has to do with the failure to link the predominance of the dish in Great Britain with the history of colonialism, imperialismand racism, including continuing racist treatment of people from the Indian subcontinent and related areas in Great Britain. Maybe the pizza example is a good comparison in some odd ways -- remember Italians were discriminated against in major ways in the US in teh 19th and early twentieth centuries. . . . . so. . . . there is more to this than what is tasty where and how that links to nation states.
Posted by: Bibliochef at Aug 24, 2006 10:43:20 AM
I once saw a restaurant in Columbus, Wisconsin named
Pizza Chez Fritz. Only in America.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Aug 24, 2006 8:54:16 PM
Clinton: My main objection to "fusion" cuisine isn't that it's mixing two cuisines, it's that most of it tastes like crap. I suppose a form of food Darwinism will eventually weed out the deep-fried sushi and other monstrous combinations that should never have been born, leaving only the tastiest combinations. In the meantime, most "fusion" cuisine tastes like it was invented by randomly spinning the Wheels O' Food to generate combinations that no one would have dreamed of. Not everything that's tasty is tasty together.
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Posted by: levan at Sep 12, 2006 4:03:00 AM
I'm sick of you people trying to think you invented everything , it was invented by a indian chef , who came to england and somebody just compained tat it was dry so the chef put sauce over it! , so the chef invented it!
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Posted by: 南京北春 at Aug 21, 2007 3:05:17 AM
I wish everyone would just shut up about who made this and any dish for
that matter because its the taste that matters!
Posted by: Jee at Sep 8, 2007 4:47:41 AM
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