Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday

Happy birthday to that eponymous British dish (that claims to be Indian) Chicken Tikka Masala, which celebrates 60 years this month.

It is the UK's most popular dish, according to Food Service Intelligence.

It represents 25% of the total turnover of £2.5BN of all the 9000 "curry houses" in the UK. In another staggering statistic the organisers of the National Curry Week have estimated that if all the portions of chicken tikka masala consumed annually in the UK were stacked on top of one another, they would form a tower 2770 times taller than the Greenwich Millennium Dome.

The origin of this peculiar hybrid dish is rumoured to be one of the first Bangladeshi restaurants that opened in Britain in the 1940s. A customer was disappointed to find that his Chicken Tikka was "dry", as it was meant to be. He therefore asked for some gravy, the chef opened a can of tomato soup and poured that over it.

Result?

The birth of a new dish, the rest is history.