What The Fork: How Kunal Vijayakar, Who Grew up in a Fish-eating Family, Fell for the Humble Chicken

We came from a predominantly fish-eating family, and there was always a variety of fish or shell-fish at every meal. Sundays were reserved for meat, and it was always mutton. Chicken did not even remotely feature anywhere on our weekly menu. But that was my grandmother digging her heels in the pre-Partition tradition that she had grown up with. Partition did change a lot though. Especially in the North, a cuisine that had developed and thrived on the sustained patronage of the Mughals and the kitchens of the Nawabs had already started to disappear. Byzantine-old dishes like pasanda, gola-kebabs, and exotic mutton or goat curries got relegated to the memories of old dusty family cookbooks and khansamas. On the streets of Old Delhi, some kebabchis shifted to Pakistan, while most melted away into time. Change was in the air as fleeing refugees from Punjab who brought in the ‘tandoor’, along with their rotis and naans, decided to put a whole marinated chicken into the hot embers and created a whole new dish, or may I say a cuisine, or nay, a full market with their creation, “the tandoori chicken”.

Rise of the White Meat

At home, the battle of red meat vs white meat was about to start changing our eating habits, and with traditional vegetarians getting more adventurous, a healthy, mild flavoured meat was required to indulge the neophyte.

While I still think of chicken as a colourless, odourless and savourless meat, one way of looking at chicken is through the eyes of famous 19th century French gourmet, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Jean describes the humble chicken as a culinary blank canvas, which is a veritable smörgåsbord of gastronomic potential. And that’s exactly how I decided to concede to it, and we all embraced chicken with fervour.

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Despite our culinary chauvinism, we were a family that loved to eat out. It was a weekly expedition that the extended family took to the city’s most popular Indian and Continental restaurants. In these restaurants, gone was the sophisticated spicing and yoghurt-based cooking of true Mughlai food. This was replaced by chicken in brawny onion-tomato gravies that exemplified every single dish that was presented under the name of Mughlai or Punjabi cuisine. This was now the new template for Indian food at home and even abroad. And on this menu was a lot of chicken, both Indian and Continental. Tandoori Chicken, Butter Chicken, Chicken Malai Methi, Chicken Do Pyaaza, Chicken Jalfrezi, Chicken A la Kiev (chicken breast stuffed with frozen butter, batter fried), Coq au vin (chicken cooked with bacon in red wine), Chicken Cecilia (chicken baked with asparagus in a cheese sauce) or simply Roast or Grilled chicken.

I could hardly resist the flaming flavour of a well-marinated and somewhat-smouldering Tandoori Chicken. Or a Chicken Makhanwala—creamy, smooth, with just the right amount of spice and smokiness. Chunks of tandoori chicken in the silken gravy, succulent and charred. The cream has to be just right and cut through the sourness of the tomato. Nothing compares to this, especially when eaten with hot butter naan.

Roast it Well

But tandoori is not the first chicken to be put into an oven. In fact, the tandoori and its subsequent offshoots are pretty much post 1947. The French or British Roast Chicken is centuries-old. It all started off with smearing fat and herbs and plunging a skewer through the bird to roast on a rotisserie. The domesticated version is the ‘oven version’ that we know of today.

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Poulet Rôti, or French Roast Chicken, is a French classic and is just so simple. A whole chicken is seasoned with herbs and placed on top of a bed of root vegetables, then basted with plenty of butter and shoved into an oven. The British do it in a similar way, sometimes smearing butter between the bird and the skin. When cooked perfectly with crisp skin, moist white breast and deep rich leg, a Roast Chicken is hard to resist.

With due apologies to my grandmother, I too have succumbed to the humble chicken.

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