Ideas with Legs #11: Butter Chicken
Also some thoughts on mortality that you are absolutely free to skip past
Before we get started on this one, let it be known that I plan on diving straight into some sad little themes over the following few paragraphs. A good chunk of death, a healthy dose of dementia, and a little bit of cancer thrown in for good measure. If that’s not your vibe right now (and honestly, if it is, then my thoughts are with you), feel free to leap right on down to the recipe. It’s delicious, I swear. Consider that your warning.
A few days ago, at a folk gig, the musician was telling the room that each fiddle player develops their own distinct style of playing. The nuances of each fiddler’s approach to their music become ingrained in the tunes they write themselves.
A friend of this musician had passed lately, and at some point in the weeks after their death - perhaps at the wake, perhaps at a folk club they’d frequented - a number of their friends gathered to spend an evening playing together. Among the tunes they performed were a selection written by their late friend. And as they played these pieces, the musician told us, it felt almost as though they shared the room with the composer. To play these tunes the way that they were written was to revive the author of each piece, at least until the music ended.
My grandfather died a month ago, and I’ve spent much of the last few weeks attempting to understand the ways in which I may revive him, if only for a few moments. In a sense, my family has been struggling with this question for some time now. My grandfather died from a sudden and aggressive cancer, but we had already spent the past few years watching him slowly fade away, a victim of dementia.
It’s hard to tell when dementia first kicks in. It felt to me as though I was the first person to see him change. Several years ago, I realised that the grandfather I loved was distancing himself from me—just me—in a way that others wouldn’t experience until a few years later. In time, though, it was impossible to deny. One by one, the things my grandfather loved—nature, birds, and walks through the Norfolk countryside—faded away. Before long, it seemed all he had left were crosswords and jigsaw puzzles. And then, the puzzle pieces started to go missing. The words failed to come to him so easily.
Let’s talk birds for a moment; my grandfather taught my dad about birds, and my dad taught me. When I lived in Brighton, I would speak to my grandfather about the whirling murmurations of starlings that could be seen just a few minutes walk from my home. Even as we gathered for the funeral, I took the time to talk to my father about a new app that I had been introduced to: a Shazam for birdsong that brought joy to my parents’ rural garden.
In some ways, the human mind seems to be a murmuration; tens of thousands of little things all moving about individually in just such a way as to create direction and purpose. Dementia flies in like an insatiable hawk, picking off the youngest ideas that haven’t yet settled into the flock. There are still thousands of things happening, but now they are in utter disarray. Without form, and with the newest thoughts being nabbed from the air, there’s less and less hope for the future.
So we began to lose my grandfather some time ago, if we’re really honest. Several years before his passing, we were already looking for ways to play the tunes that would bring him back to the room. I’d been trying for the longest time, working each year to find more and more meaningful Christmas presents that could reconnect us. I unearthed a rare copy of a corporate memoir about his beloved former employer. I spent several weeks writing a crossword from scratch, and having it printed on the back of a jigsaw puzzle for him to complete, and then complete again. I don’t believe he ever even started it.
We find ourselves now trying to find the tunes that will revive him in small moments for years to come. My grandmother used to write poetry. As the clearance of their shared home begins, I have taken her writings into my own house and am working out how best to share them with the rest of the family. But my grandfather didn’t leave us so obvious a score from which to play his music. Instead, we have to treat ourselves as the melodies, and attempt to find the nuances of the way he played reflected in us.
The night before my grandfather’s funeral, my dad and I stepped out into his garden. Immediately - the moment I set my eyes on the night sky - I started pointing out the constellations I could spot among the darkness, and we took a brief moment to peer beyond the dining room lights, and into the space above us. The next day, my uncle spoke in his eulogy of the telescope my grandfather once built from scratch - grinding the lens into shape, creating a tool so powerful that it could pick out the most intricate details even from the family’s flat rooftop in the depths of London. It isn’t much, but it’s enough, those shimmering moments of harmony between past and present. The brief juncture at which two blooming murmurations cross paths before continuing on their separate journeys.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, my recent thoughts on chicken legs have been broadly disconnected from my grandfather and grief. Deaths in the family exist on a separate plane from these things—a new, unique concern that runs in parallel to our existing lives. We lose the ones we love, but our lives still require attention. In grief, we continue to work, to feed the cats, to find ways to feed ourselves despite whatever obstacles block our way.
This is my way of excusing the fact that, as my family prepared for my grandfather’s funeral, I was working out how to make better curries.
There is, I think we can agree, a Big Four in the takeaway world. Our options are myriad now, with Deliveroo willing to send almost anything I might desire to my door. Korean fried chicken. Ackee and saltfish patties. A rubber duck that’s dressed as Santa.1 But the Big Four - the options available to almost everyone within a twenty-minute drive of a town since the early 1990s - remain the main contenders. Chinese. Indian. Pizza. Fish and chips.
Of them, an Indian takeaway is far and away the safest bet for a gluten-free chump like myself. The naan is a write-off, but poppadums are usually on the table, and even the bhajis are generally made with gram flour - nothing more than finely ground chickpeas.
And yet I rarely order myself a curry, knowing that I can make great Indian food at home for a fraction of the cost. Usually, this means taking Madhur Jaffrey’s phenomenal Curry Easy from the shelf, picking a recipe randomly, and being enamoured with the end result. Jaffrey’s book is potentially the most frequently used within my collection. It is certainly the most consistent - I have had no misses, ever, with any of the recipes drawn from its pages. But the sheer authenticity of the book means that very few of the dishes within recreate the saucy goodness of an Indian takeaway.
And so: butter chicken. A stalwart of the genre. A dish so quintessentially tied to the Indian takeaway canon that we often assume it to be a Western creation. It actually originates from Delhi, albeit as a relatively recent invention by the same two friends who also lay claim to inventing dal makhani and paneer makhani2, and who popularised what we think of today as Tandoori chicken - apt, given that a rough approximation of the latter is how the below recipe gets underway.
This dish is best when you can plan ahead, giving the chicken a full night to marinate. It’s worth the wait though, and your time in the kitchen the next day comes down to a little over half an hour. Just long enough for the rice cooker to do its job.
Butter Chicken
Serves 4
4 chicken legs, skin removed
1 tsp salt
1 lemon
For the marinade:
450g natural yoghurt
1/2 onion, roughly chopped
1 garlic clove, peeled
3cm fresh ginger, roughly chopped3
1/2 hot green chilli, roughly chopped
2 tsp Garam masala
2 tbsp Kashmiri chilli powder (or paprika)
For the Butter Chicken:
4 tbsp tomato purée
1 tbsp minced ginger
300ml single cream
1 tsp Garam masala
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tbsp coriander, finely chopped
1 hot green chilli, finely chopped
1 tbsp lemon juice
110g unsalted butter
Let’s get cooking:
Using a knife, cut three long slits into the meat on both sides of each chicken leg. Cut each slit deep enough to reach the bone.
Put the legs on a plate and season them throughly on both sides with the salt. Cut the lemon in half, and squeeze the one half of the juice over the legs, before flipping them and repeating the process on the opposite side with the other half.
Place all the ingredients for the marinade in a deep bowl. Use a hand blender to blitz them into a paste. Alternatively, use a food processor.
Place a sieve over a separate large bowl, and empty the paste into it, using the back of a spoon to push as much as possible through.
Brush both sides of the chicken legs with the Kashmiri chilli powder, and then transfer everything, including any accumulated juices, into the bowl with the marinade. Mix thoroughly using your hands, ensuring the marinade gets into the slits you cut into the chicken. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
The next day, preheat your oven to its highest setting. Remove the chicken legs from the bowl and shake off any excess marinade. Place them on a shallow baking tray and bake in the oven for thirty minutes.
While they cook, prepare the sauce. Put the tomato purée in a measuring jug and add water up to 225ml. Mix thoroughly. Add the ginger, cream, Garam masala, salt, sugar, cayenne, cumin, coriander, green chilli and lemon juice to the jug and mix well.
About five minutes before your chicken is done, heat the butter in a large sauté pan. When it has melted, add the mixture from the jug. Bring to a simmer and cook for a minute or two, stirring to until the butter combines with the sauce.
Remove the chicken from the oven, and use tongs to transfer each leg into the pan. Don’t transfer any juices. Spoon a little sauce over each chicken, and continue to simmer for a minute longer before serving.
Eat.
I served my butter chicken with rice and a shop-bought gluten free pitta. I’d recommend the former, but you can do better on the bread front. Or! Don’t have bread at all. Chips are good, too. Poppadums are great, obviously. I guess what I’m saying is: you’d order a million different things from an Indian takeaway and then eat far too much. That’s not going to happen here. Make the one dish, have a nice little side, and feel good about your decisions.
One Indian joint I do keep returning to is Paaji’s at the Kean’s Head pub in Nottingham. They’ve had a dish on their weekly specials board for, well, about four months now: a ‘Jahangiri mango habanero curry’, and my god, it’s good. I rarely order the same thing twice at a restaurant if the rest of the menu also looks great - but the Kean’s Head mango habanero curry has a hold on my unlike anything I’ve eaten in years. It is my favourite food in the world right now, I think, and I am going to work out how to make it at home. You have my word.
I went to the cinema twice last weekend, but both screenings were films that are over half a century old. I loved each of them, mind, so if you want a fresh-off-the-press take that only your late grandparents, or perhaps former prime minister Harold Macmillan could have offered you: Once Upon a Time in the West is excellent, and The Night of the Hunter might be my favourite film from the 1950s.
If you’re looking for great new music that’s out now, I’ve recently been introduced to Laura Reznek, whose second album came out a couple of weeks back. It’s gorgeous - lush, thoughtful music that reminds me of Laura Marling, Regina Spektor, and The Staves in equal measure.
If you’re looking for great new music that comes out this Friday, my record label Folkroom is about to launch the second album from Patch & the Giant, Fragments. It’s a record that sees the band maturing both in style and in writing, and I’m honoured to be a part of the process of getting it out into the world. I think you’ll really like it.
And, finally, if you’re looking for great live music, I’m putting on a whole bunch of gigs this month, spanning London, Brighton and Nottingham. You can see them all here, where you can also sign up to the Folkroom newsletter, Modern Folk, to receive this month’s email tomorrow.
£3.99 plus delivery from Wilko, who may not be on the high street anymore, but are available via the app to provide everything from reading glasses to chrome cistern levers for my home toilet repairs.
‘Makhani’ just means ‘butter’ - this dish is also known as ‘makhani murgha’. So we can assume that the name of the restaurant that created these dishes, Moti Mahal, translates to something like ‘Cardiac Kitchen’, or perhaps ‘Butter Boys’.
You can peel it too, if you like, but literally nobody is ever going to know if you don’t.