Where Does Chicken Tikka Massala Come From ???

Glasgow.
      Britain exports chicken tikka masala to India. Invented in Glasgow in the late 1960s, chicken tikka masala, or CTM, is Britain’s most popular dish. There is no standard recipe. In a recent survey, the Real Curry Guide tested forty-eight different versions and found the only common ingredient was chicken.
 

    Chicken tikka is a traditional Bangladeshi dish in which pieces of marinated chicken are cooked in a clay oven called a tandoor. This ancient style of cooking originated in the Middle East, the word deriving from the Babylonian tinuru, meaning ‘fire’.
 
     The First chicken tandoori on a British restaurant menu was at the Gaylord in Mortimer Street, London, in 1966 – the same restaurant where Not the Nine O’Clock News was invented in 1979. The recipe reached Glasgow shortly afterwards and when, as the legend goes, a customer asked for some gravy to go with it, the chef improvised with tomato soup, spices and cream. '
    
   Masala means a mixture of spices, and the usual CTM contains ginger and garlic, tomatoes, butter and cream, spiced with cardamom, cloves, cumin, nutmeg, mild red chilli powder and paprika, fenugreek and turmeric.
 
    It is the turmeric that it gives it the bright yellow colour, although the synthetic dye tartrazine is often substituted. (It is tartrazine, among other unpleasant things, that makes curry stains impossible to remove from clothing.) CTM doesn’t have a standard style or colour: it can be yellow, brown, red, or green and chilli hot; creamy and mild; or very smooth and sweet. In 2001, the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook declared that: ‘Chicken tikka masala is now 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.’ One in seven curries sold in the UK are CTMs – 23 million portions each year. Many of the schools and charities in the city of Sylhet in Bangladesh are funded by profits from the British chicken tikka masala boom. There are now 8,000 Indian restaurants in Britain, turning over in excess of £2 billion and employing 70,000 workers.