*Or so he claims. I'm finding that hard to believe.
*Maybe chicken tikka is better described as a global dish. Sort of like a hamburger, which after
being ported all over the planet sure doesn't have much to do with Hamburg.
*One could likely compose an entire cookbook of dishes of transnational origin, especially because so many nations have ceased to exist while their food just chugs right along.
*If you deconstructed most modern restaurant meals you'd find the ingredients came from most every inhabited continent.
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091203/REVIEW/712039986/1008
(...)
But even as curry “lost caste” among the British in India, Sen writes, “the situation was very different in Britain, where all things Indian... became the fashion among a new cosmopolitan middle class. By the end of the 19th century, curry had become thoroughly integrated into middle-class British cuisine.” Curry came condensed into powdered flavourings in jars, or at the clubs and coffee-houses that existed as little pools of nostalgia for the India-returned. Queen Victoria ate it; William Makepeace Thackeray wrote poems about it; restaurants fought over who served the most authentic versions of it. An outsider looking afresh upon the late 19th century could have presumed that curry had somehow leapfrogged British society in India and landed directly into the heart of London life.
Throughout, curry continued to shift shape, always prepared to alter its accents to become intelligible to a whole new audience. This was how, for instance, an immigrant cook from Bangladesh could improvise yoghurt-and-spice gravy for an otherwise dry chicken recipe and invent Britain’s national dish. Chicken tikka masala’s true triumph has not been its staggering popularity, but rather its masquerade as antique ethnic food in an alien land – so persuasive that the British foreign secretary Robin Cook saw in its sunset-tinted gravy “a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adopts external influences”. Mulling Cook’s self-congratulatory remark, Ziauddin Sardar observes in his book Balti Britain: “What a fine piece of nonsense this was... It was not Britain that had adapted to chicken tikka masala but countless Indian restaurants that had manipulated their cultural repertoire with ingenuity to find a niche in British life.” (...)
