The Indian subcontinent · Volume 13, The Tandoor Wall, the Wagah Line and a Contested Butter Chicken
Murgh makhani (butter chicken)
Delhi, Moti Mahal
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour
- Researched
- Researched from 83 sources in the brief
Leftover tandoori chicken, dried out overnight without refrigeration, revived in a tomato gravy enriched heavily with butter and, in most modern versions, cream. The standard account across nearly every source, family and independent, is consistent on the mechanism, using up chicken that would otherwise go to waste, and genuinely inconsistent on everything else: Moti Mahal's own 2013 cookbook credited the discovery to Delhi in the 1950s; the same family's 2024 lawsuit places it in Peshawar in the 1930s, before Partition, a documented contradiction inside one family's own telling. What is not disputed is that it came out of the Gujral-Jaggi-Magu partnership at one of their two Moti Mahals; which man, which city and which decade remain, as Vir Sanghvi puts it, having interviewed both families himself, possibly unknowable, since "all the food was credited to the restaurant as a whole and not to individuals" at the time. This chapter also carries a real and important corrective, from food writer Karishma Kuenzang and several named Indian chefs and historians: butter chicken has no real precedent in older Punjabi home cooking at all. It is a twentieth-century Delhi restaurant invention that became, globally, the flavour most people now think of as Punjabi, obscuring a home cuisine that is in fact more vegetarian, more seasonal and considerably less cream-heavy than the dish that carries its name.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour, plus marinating the chicken (Dish 1).
Ingredients
- 1 batch (800g raw weight, see Dish 1) tandoori chicken (see Dish 1), cooked and cut into pieces
- 50g butter
- 4 green cardamom pods
- 4 cloves
- 6 black peppercorns
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 1.5 tbsp ginger-garlic paste
- 400g tomato puree
- 1 tsp red chilli powder
- to taste salt
- as needed water, as needed
- 1 tbsp sugar or honey
- 1 tsp kasoori methi, crushed
- 100ml fresh cream
Method
- Melt the butter and sauté the whole spices, the green cardamom pods, cloves, black peppercorns and cinnamon stick, 2 minutes, until fragrant.
- Add the ginger-garlic paste and sauté a further 2 minutes.
- Stir in the tomato puree, chilli powder, salt and a little water. Simmer 10 minutes.
- Add the sugar or honey and crushed kasoori methi, and simmer a further 5 minutes.
- Fold in the cooked tandoori chicken pieces and finish with the cream, warming through without boiling hard.
Notes
No restaurant's own guarded gram-and-hour recipe for this dish is published anywhere; the quantities above are a credible mainstream Indian chef's version, used as a benchmark for proportion rather than as the actual Moti Mahal original.
What a modern chef changes
Proportion judged by taste, not by a fixed ratio.
Rung 2
Method
- Balance tomato against cream by tasting as you reduce, rather than following a fixed ratio; too much tomato turns the dish sour, too little robs it of the umami depth a good butter chicken needs, a genuinely informed Indian critic's own stated benchmark.
- Use chicken cooked properly to Rung 1's tandoor standard, not a boiled or generically oven-baked substitute; a token spice-mix "tandoori" flavour applied without the real char is the single most common shortcut that separates a curry-house version from the real thing.
- Finish with cream off the heat, added gradually, rather than boiled hard into the gravy, to keep its texture silky rather than split.