Tandoori Chicken Celebrates 80th Birthday

We are told that Tandoori murga (or chicken), India’s contribution to the world of cuisine, was born in Peshawar in 1929. After India’s bloody Partition, the shop (later known as “Moti Mahal”) moved to Daryaganj in New Delhi, very close to the ancestral house of Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf.

Tandoori chicken gained in popularity when India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, began ordering this dish for official banquets. Visiting dignitaries that enjoyed the Tandoori dish, included American Presidents Richard Nixon and John Kennedy, Soviet leaders Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev, the King of Nepal, and the Shah of Iran.

Tandoori chicken’s history is traced to a young Hindu cook, Kundan Lal Gujral, who worked at a small shop called “Moti Sweets” in Peshawar, the border town of Pakistan-Afghanistan now much in news for other reasons. Many Hindus and Sikhs had made this town, inhabited by fiercely independent and tradition-bound Pathans/Pashtuns, their home as it provided great business opportunities.

At the shop owner’s request, young Gujral ‘invented’ this dish because the former wasn’t well and wanted a chicken dish sans lots of spices and curry. In those days Indian bread was cooked in bell-shaped ovens, set into the earth and fired with wood or charcoal. Gujral used the oven or ‘tandoor’ to prepare roasted chicken that were succulent inside and crispy outside.

Soon after came the butter chicken dish. “Instead of letting leftover pieces of tandoori chicken go waste, an inspired Gujral came up with a rich, creamy gravy to dunk them into. The butter chicken or murgh makhani was born.”

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