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On the day of Christmas last year, Ali Ahmed Aslam, the Pakistani-born Scottish chef, often credited with the invention of ubiquitous chicken tikka masala, was admitted to the hospital. “His head was slumped down. I stayed for 10 minutes. Before I left, he lifted his head and said you should be at work ... the restaurant was his life,” remembers Andleeb Ahmed, Aslam’s nephew.
Ali Aslam died earlier this week at the age of 77 due to septic shock and organ failure after a prolonged illness, leaving behind his wife, Kalsoom Akhtar, their five children, and an enduring legacy of popularising south Asian cuisine in the United Kingdom.
Ali Ahmed Aslam was born into a family of farmers in a small village near Lahore, Pakistan. As an adolescent at the age of 16, he arrived in Glasgow in 1959 and worked in the clothes industry along with his uncle in the daylight and sliced onions at a local restaurant during the night.
In 1969, he married Kalsoom Akhtar, who also hailed from the same village in Pakistan, and they soon became parents to five children – Shaista Ali-Sattar, Rashaid Ali, Omar Ali, Samiya Ali, and Asif Ali.
“On a typical dark, wet Glasgow night in 1971, a bus driver coming off shift came in and ordered a chicken curry. He sent it back to the waiter, saying it is dry,” narrates Asif Ali on a 2013 episode of the British TV cookery programme, Hairy Bikers.
Ali went on to explain that his father was eating tomato soup and was suffering from an ulcer at the time.
“He never really put so much importance on it,” Asif Ali adds. “He just told people how he made it.”
The chicken tikka masala created by chef Ali Aslam changed the palate of a nation, argues Asma Khan, a celebrity chef and restaurateur who was the first British chef on Netflix’s Chef’s Table.
Since then, the number of south Asian restaurants in the United Kingdom has exponentially expanded, and today there are approximately 8500 of them in the country.
While chicken tikka masala has only been around since the 1970s, its origins have a much longer history – well, at least the tikka part – and without that, there would be no chicken tikka masala.
Though Ali Aslam is largely attributed as the pioneer of chicken tikka masala (CTM), other curry restaurants and kitchens in the UK have also claimed its ownership – suggesting that the dish was most likely not one person’s invention.
However, every simultaneous discovery was intrinsically tied with the addition of cream, yogurt, tomatoes and garam masala – a distinct and blatant fusion of British and Desi tastes and traditions.
The south Asian curry saw its zenith in the curry houses of 1970s Britain and sooner became a cultural and powerful symbol.
While alluding to a survey that showed it was more popular than fish and chips, he said,
Though if one considers the history of the British Empire and the post-1947 migration to the UK from the Indian subcontinent, it reveals how CTM has become a national dish in Britain.
The reason for this is not that CTM is the most liked dish or that it was invented in the United Kingdom; rather, it exemplifies how the British people have absorbed and adapted to ideas and influences from other countries.
The dish also played an enormous role in becoming part of the fabric of the south Asian diaspora. It reveals a shocking truth: the transformation shaping Indian cuisine, which is an amalgamation of contradictory cultural manifestations with a strong parallel with its rich history of a wide range of dishes famous across the world.
(Kalrav Joshi is a multimedia journalist based in London. He writes on politics, democracy, culture, and technology. He tweets @kalravjoshi_.)
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