The name of this enigma - Chicken Tikka Masala of course. The flagship dish of Britain’s newly acclaimed ‘national cuisine’ boasting a huge 14.6% of the sales of the almost half a million curries consumed, on average, in the restaurants and homes of the United Kingdon every day of the year. Chicken Tikka Masala, or CTM as it was affectionately dubbed by writer Colleen Grove in ‘Spice n Easy Magazine’ in November 1994, is one of those culinary fables that lend a touch of intrigue and excitement to an already exotic cuisine.

The interest in CTM is quite unbelievable and it is estimated that it forms the subject of well over 60% of all enquiries directed at us from the media both nationally and internationally.

However, exist it does and demanded it is, so just what is Chicken Tikka Masala? Tikkas are the bite-sized chunks you cut chicken into and these are marinated and cooked in the tandoor. The masala part is where things become difficult. Masala means spices but no exact recipe for these seems to exist. CTM can be yellow, red, brownish or even green and can be very creamy, a little creamy, chilli hot or quite mild. In restaurants it tends to be a creamy sauce - not too hot; a bit tomatoey; very smooth and, all too often, quite sweet and very red. In supermarkets, once you have by-passed the masses of CTM pizzas, filled pancakes, kievs, pies, microwave rolls and so on, you come to the chilled and frozen ready meals which range from mild onion gravy to saffron cream to velvety vermillion.

Created on the spur of the moment under pressure it may have been but, as a culinary concept, the dish, if not the name, already existed. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the earliest known recipe for meat in a spicy sauce with a bread appeared on tablets found near Babylon in Mesopotamia, written in cuniform text by the Sumerians from 1700 B.C.

No ‘Indian’ chef seems to have produced any real evidence that he or she first invented the dish and it is commonly thought that its invention came about almost by accident