India's courts to rule on who invented butter chicken | Hacker News Reader

India's courts to rule on who invented butter chicken

theguardian.com

43 pointskasperni51 comments

From Wikipedia’s Butter Chicken[1]

> The curry was developed at the Moti Mahal restaurant in the Daryaganj neighbourhood of Old Delhi in the 1950s, after the Partition of India by Kundan Lal Jaggi and Kundan Lal Gujral, who were both Punjabi refugees from Peshawar.

Whoever did it, but if the dates are correct, I’m surprised that this is a recent dish/recipe, not something like the Mughals introduced to India. The types of dishes that Butter Chicken is categorized into sound like Mughlai cuisine[2].

Disclaimer: Besides my curiosity, I eat to live and have no clue in many, many cases related to food and cuisines.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter_chicken

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughlai_cuisine

The tomato needed to be brought from the New World for butter chicken to be invented.

The Mughal empire started in 1526, and Mughals Cuisine was in full swing by the 1600s.

That said, based on linguistics, I don't think the tomato arrived in India until at least the late 1700s.

I've eaten it earlier, multiple times.

Whoever invented it, it tastes too sweet to me. Probably due to the amount of onion (1) in it, an issue I come across in Indian veg gravy dishes too.

(1) The article says it is made in a tomato gravy, but my guess is that it is an onion and tomato gravy, not just a tomato one.

You ate it earlier than 1947? Or what do you mean by earlier?

Maybe even the 1920’s!

“They say the recipe […] was invented by Gujral in the 1930s”.

Jk.

Let’s do the math:

Assume 5 years old to remember anything.

1946 is before 1947.

To be 5 in 1946, they’re born in 1941.

1941 was 82 years ago.

82+ years old and commenting on HackerNews?

Statistically unlikely but definitely plausible. Us nerds are getting up there in years so there’s certainly some octogenarians hanging around.

I meant earlier than the present, of course.

Of course, if reincarnation theory is true, I might have eaten it in some past life between 1947 and my birth year in this one.

ChatGPT, do you remember your past lives?

To be fair, Indian restaurants in the west sell a fully bastardized version of Indian food from India. (Canada is an exception, UK does its own thing)

Despite being the predominant regional cuisine, the Punjabi/Mughlai food in the west also the most disappointmenting. Consistently too sweet, too creamy, too tomatoey and lacking the depth of fresh spices.

>To be fair, Indian restaurants in the west sell a fully bastardized version of Indian food from India.

The situation is similar for Chinese restaurants in India.

I first got to know about this from my aunt, an Indian but a naturalised US citizen, when she came on one of her periodic visits to India, to see us.

When we were eating at a Chinese restaurant in India, she remarked that the food was very different from authentic Chinese food.

(It has been heavily modified to use Indian spices and to appeal to Indian tastes.)

Later, when I went to Chinese restaurants in Malaysia and the US, I could see this for myself.

I thought it was Australian, like how Chicken Tikka Masala is British

If it is a meat dish, from India, it is far more likely to have been invented by Indians for the Brits living in India. Whether that makes it Indian or British I leave to others.

That's not true. Huge numbers of Indians aren't Hindu and do eat meat. Less than 40% of the country is vegetarian. There are meat dishes that pre-date the arrival of the British, although it's true that almost all Indian food has been altered by British colonialism.

And Portuguese colonialism. Practically all modern Punjabi food from makki to rajma is from South America.

Don't forget the Pav Bhaji. The "Pav" in the name of the dish derives from Portuguese "Pāo".

I'll stop with this and refrain from mentioning how South Indian cuisine has been corrupted by Northern Indian cultural imperialism :)

The pav is actually pronounced as pao sometimes.

The Portuguese "Pão" sounds more like the French "Pan". "Pav" or "Pao" is the Indianization.

Too late to edit, didn't see the typo earlier. s/pāo/pão/ .

>Don't forget the Pav Bhaji.

Dont forget the vada pav either.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vada_pav

Not a bad dish, though carb-heavy, like pav bhaji.

I've had it many times when I lived in Maharashtra.

For me, it's incomplete without the fried and salted green chillies as an accompaniment. Yum. :)

Yum indeed! I also make sure to ask for an extra helping of the (dry) peanut chutney. That and the green chillies are must-haves with a vada pav for me :)

I don't remember that dry peanut chutney.

Do you mean thecha?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thecha

I have read about it, but unfortunately I did not come across it, despite living in Maharashtra for some years.

Got to say, from the description, it sounds like it would taste quite good.

And could be a good accompaniment to many dishes.

I've always heard it referred to as "Dana Chutney", Dana being a contraction of Shengdana.

I don't know if it's the same thing as Thecha, though -- but it does fit the description. I'm wondering if this is a geographical difference in culinary terminology :)

Yes, I think it must be the same.

Dana (as a short form) and shengdana both mean peanuts, in Marathi, the main language of Maharashtra.

Actually dana means seed in both Marathi and Hindi, as in anardana, which means pomegranate (seed), meaning the part of the pomegranate that you eat.

As you said, words can vary a lot between regions - and not just for culinary terms.

Indeed :) My fondness for Vada Pav and Dana Chutney came to be because I spent a few years in Pune.

> And Portuguese colonialism. Practically all modern Punjabi food from makki to rajma is from South America.

Vindeloo is derived from Portuguese cuisine as well. In fact, the Portuguese are widely accredited with introducing spicy chili peppers into Indian cuisine.

Vindaloo has been corrupted from the original.

I've had both kinds, both in Goa.

See:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vindaloo

The original did not have potatoes. but because aloo means potato in Hindi, others have changed the dish by including potatoes.

>Huge numbers of Indians aren't Hindu and do eat meat.

Just in case anyone has the wrong idea (and I guess some people do), being Hindu does not equate to not eating meat.

Many Hindus eat meat (and many don't (though even that has nuances)), and have done so from ancient times, not just nowadays because of modernisation or westernization, although that has increased the percentage too, IMO.

Wow, the Wikipedia article has over 500 edits in the past five years, fairly absurd for a ~5 paragraph entry.

I don't care. My local guy makes it better than you.

This sounds like a punch line for "why did the chicken cross the road?"

Ahh to be from the Midwest where if you're lucky enough to have an Indian restaurant in your town, half the time you're getting something that's more chicken tikki than butter chicken.

Also, I feel if it does have fenugreek in it, it isn't a "real" murgh makhani either.

It was invented at an American restaurant, Taj Mahal Star of India, in a strip mall in Anaheim, California. Stop appropriating American culture.

Stop exporting American culture.

Do you want to send your cell phone, tablet, laptop back? Or stop using the internet? iPhones and Teslas and Levi's, great, but let's complain about McDonalds and Coke and Hollywood. The world is all connected now, that ship sailed a long time ago.

You, just above:

>The world is all connected now, that ship sailed a long time ago.

You, triple above:

>>Stop appropriating American culture.

Me:

The world is all connected now, that ship sailed a long time ago.

TIL that cell phones, tablets, laptops, the Internet, iPhones, Teslas and Levis are culture.

Tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech and clothing

Heck, even restaurants were invented in ancient India.

South Indian erasure once again. No one eats this in wide swaths of the country.

Why is it erasure?

Because the term "Indian" is largely used to refer only to Northern Indian "things". In this case, Butter Chicken. It's not something that you'd normally find anyone cooking down South.

Who is being erased and who is doing the alleged erasing? I’m very confused by your statement.

I'm guessing they're responding to this sentence from the article:

> It’s one of India’s most beloved dishes and can be found bubbling on kitchen stoves or served on silver in restaurants across the country.

Butter was invented in Africa a long time ago. Chickens got domesticated in SE Asia and China, introduced to India thousands of years later. So India can’t now claim they invented either.

And tomatos, potatoes and chili peppers are all from the Americas. Hmmmm? Seems like nobody's iconic cultural dishes are safe!

Ah yeah, there's a great wikipedia article that shows which common vegetables and fruits originated in which parts of the world before the Columbian exchange. Really makes you think that Italian food once had no tomatoes. And Irish and Eastern European food had no potatoes. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange

And in this case, south Indian food without the heat of chilis.

Ahh yes, apparently they were introduced by the Portuguese in the late 1400/early 1500s. They did have black pepper though.

And long peoper, which fewer people know of or talk about than black pepper, these days, but it is quite good too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_pepper

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pepper

I remember seeing it often in my grandma’s kitchen as a kid.

Why is this on hacker news?

Because this food item was a 'hack' ? Invented just to reuse the left over chicken tikka from the day before.

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