Easy Made Butter Chicken

While the original murgh makhani was born in the tandoor kitchen of Moti Mahal, what happened next is equally important to the recipe's history. As Delhi filled with Punjabi refugees in the months following partition — over a million people arriving in the capital with nothing — the home cooks of the refugee camps and the hastily built neighborhoods of South Delhi began adapting the restaurant dish for the domestic kitchen, without a tandoor, without a professional kitchen, and without the luxury of the premium ingredients that Kundan Lal Gujral had used. They found that if you marinated the chicken in yogurt and spices overnight — mimicking the tenderizing effect of the tandoor's intense dry heat — and then cooked it in the butter-tomato-cream sauce on a stovetop, the result was, if anything, more complex than the restaurant original. The slow stovetop cooking allowed the tomato to reduce more deeply, the spices to bloom more thoroughly, and the cream to integrate more completely than the quick restaurant method permitted. This version — the home cook's butter chicken, built for a regular weeknight rather than a restaurant service — is what a million Punjabi cooks developed in the years after partition and what has been passed down through their families ever since. It may be the most cooked recipe in the Indian diaspora worldwide.