Why should butter chicken be included in your culinary conversations, again?

If there is one dish that has become deeply unfashionable to admit you love, it is butter chicken. Some restaurants announce, with almost performative pride, that they do not serve it, as though its absence is a certificate of culinary virtue. Others quietly leave it on the menu because they know exactly how the evening is going to end. You can wax lyrical about forgotten recipes, serve heirloom dals cooked for 18 hours and source a rare variety of wheat from a tiny Punjabi hamlet, but when a family of six sits down, someone is still going to say, "One butter chicken."

Is the undying love for butter chicken shifting loyalties?

There is a reason for that. A smoky tandoori chicken swimming in a velvety tomato gravy with just enough butter to make your cardiologist sigh, scooped up with a hot butter naan, is not merely dinner in Delhi. It is muscle memory. Which makes me wonder: when did loving butter chicken become uncool?

Don't get me wrong. I love what is happening to Punjabi food right now. For decades, the cuisine was flattened into three dishes and a basket of naan. Finally, chefs are talking about forgotten recipes, pastoral cooking, seasonal vegetables, family kitchens and the extraordinary diversity that existed long before Punjabi food became shorthand for "North Indian". It is a correction that was long overdue.

Somewhere along the way, though, we confused expanding the conversation with replacing it. Traditional became virtuous and popular became pedestrian. If you really understood food, apparently, you had to distance yourself from butter chicken. It is culinary snobbery dressed up as discernment.

Perhaps that is why, with Independence Day around the corner, butter chicken deserves another look. Not because it is India's greatest dish, but because it tells one of India's greatest food stories.

Butter chicken: the origin story

Butter chicken is not centuries old. It is younger than the nation itself. In the late 1940s, at Moti Mahal in Daryaganj, Kundan Lal Gujral and his partners, refugees rebuilding their lives after Partition, looked at leftover tandoori chicken and did what cooks everywhere have done in difficult times. They refused to waste it. The dried pieces were simmered in tomatoes, butter and cream, transforming yesterday's leftovers into tomorrow's bestseller.

There is something wonderfully unpretentious about that origin story. Great food is rarely born in moments of luxury. More often, it emerges from necessity, migration and the stubborn refusal to throw anything away. Butter chicken belongs in that tradition. It was never designed to become an international ambassador for Indian cuisine, but was simply a clever solution to a very immediate problem. And yet, somehow, success became its greatest crime.

We romanticise peasant food from Italy, celebrate rustic French stews and happily pay absurd amounts for humble Japanese ramen. But butter chicken? That is too commercial.

The irony, of course, is that butter chicken is deceptively difficult to get right. It is why every Delhiite has a fiercely defended favourite, and why arguments over the city's best butter chicken have probably ended more friendships than politics ever has.

The revival of regional cuisines is something we should celebrate. But it does not require butter chicken to be the villain, because food is not a zero-sum game. Perhaps the real problem is not butter chicken. It is our habit of confusing exclusivity with sophistication.

Because beneath all that butter lies a story of displacement, resilience and starting over. Few dishes wear their history so lightly. Fewer still have comforted as many people while carrying it. For something so routinely dismissed as predictable, butter chicken has had a rather extraordinary life. And I, for one, refuse to apologise for ordering it.

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