Butter chicken

• 1. Introduction

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  Butter chicken, also known as murgh makhani, is a curry of chicken cooked in a gravy of spiced tomato and butter. The gravy is famous for its creamy, rich texture. It sits on restaurant menus on several continents, and most diners never ask where it came from. The answer turns out to be contested, and the people contesting it are the families of the very chefs who made it famous. Did the dish begin as a happy accident in a Delhi kitchen? Or did it begin years earlier in a different city, under a different government? And how did a curry tied to one neighbourhood end up inside pizzas and pies on the other side of the world?

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• 2. Leftovers And Butter

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  Two chefs named Kundan Lal Gujral and Kundan Lal Jaggi are credited with developing the curry. The account most often repeated says it happened by chance. Leftover tandoori chicken was mixed into a tomato sauce rich in butter, which is makhan in Hindi, and the gravy took its name makhani from that.

  Both men were Punjabi Hindu refugees from Peshawar who settled in Delhi after the partition of India. Their restaurant, Moti Mahal, stood in the Daryaganj neighbourhood of Old Delhi. There they popularized the dish in the 1950s, and many people say it was invented in that very dining room.

  The restaurant did not stop at one recipe. It is also credited with other makhani curries, including dal makhani and paneer makhani. Butter chicken became so bound up with the city that it is now considered a staple of Delhi cuisine.

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• 3. Peshawar Or Delhi

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  In 2024, Monish Gujral gave a very different account of the dish's birthplace. He is a grandson of Kundan Lal Gujral and managing director at Moti Mahal. He said the curry was created in Peshawar itself, at another restaurant the chefs ran before partition, in the 1920s or 1930s.

  He made the claim while suing the Jaggi family. They now run a rival restaurant called Daryaganj, and they credit Kundan Lal Jaggi with inventing the dish at Moti Mohal in Delhi. The timing makes the claim stand out. In his 2013 book On the Butter Chicken Trail: A Delhi Darbar Cookbook, Monish had credited the accidental discovery to Moti Mahal in the 1950s.

  Some writers also favour Peshawar. They point out that many of the ingredients seem geared toward non-Indian tastes. They add that butter was produced at scale only in British garrison cities like Peshawar. That point about butter raises a larger puzzle: how a dish with such disputed roots came to be eaten almost everywhere.

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• 4. A Curry Abroad

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  In 1975, the English phrase butter chicken first appeared in print, as a house specialty at the Gaylord Indian restaurant in Manhattan. From there the dish travelled widely, and it changed shape as it went.

  In Canada and the Caribbean, it fills pizza, poutine, wraps, roti and rolls. In Australia and New Zealand, it is also baked into pies. The curry is common in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and in many other countries with a South Asian diaspora.

  That popularity has caused some confusion. Butter chicken is sometimes assumed to be Western in origin, and it is often mixed up with chicken tikka masala, a similar curry that uses a tomato paste. The dish itself, though, follows a fairly precise method in the kitchen.

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• 5. Inside The Pot

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  The method begins with a marinade of several hours. The chicken sits in lemon juice and dahi, which is yogurt, along with Kashmiri red chilli, salt, garam masala, ginger paste and garlic paste.

  Traditionally the marinated chicken is cooked in a tandoor, a clay oven. Cooks may instead grill it, roast it in an oven or pan-fry it. It is then served in a mild curry sauce that includes butter.

  The sauce starts from tomato, garlic and ginger. It is simmered until smooth, and much of the water cooks off. Cooks then sieve it so the texture turns velvety. Recipes vary in their spicing, and the choices include cardamom, cumin, cloves, cinnamon, coriander, pepper and garam masala. Dried fenugreek leaves, called kasuri methi in Punjabi and Hindi, are another option.

  Some cooks stir in cashew paste to thicken the sauce. A garnish of coriander finishes the plate.

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