The chicken manchurian

Few dishes have fascinated me as much as Chicken Manchurian, the most ordered dish at Chinese restaurants in India.

Few dishes have fascinated me as much as Chicken Manchurian. It is a dish that is unknown outside of India – certainly nobody in China has ever heard of it – but is, nevertheless, possibly the most ordered dish at Chinese restaurants in this country. You’ll find it on the menu of nearly every Chinese eatery – outside of the five star hotels where expatriate chefs are employed – and now, even McDonald’s does a Manchurian-style burger.

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For years I believed that because Chicken Manchurian (and now Bhindi Manchurian, Gobhi Manchurian and God alone knows what else) first began appearing on restaurant menus in the late 1970s, its rise to fame was linked to the introduction of Sichuan cooking to Indian shores (first at Bombay’s Golden Dragon and then at Delhi’s House of Ming).

But all chefs I spoke to denied that Chicken Manchurian had any connection with the early Sichuan restaurants. They conceded that because it was spicy, it had little in common with the Cantonese food that was served at most Indian Chinese restaurants till the mid-1970s but argued that perhaps some enterprising chef had sensed that spicy Chinese food appealed to Indian palates and imported this dish. But where could he have imported it from? Just as Chicken Tikka Masala, the UK’s most ordered Indian restaurant-dish is unknown in India, so Chicken Manchurian does not seem to have had an existence anywhere in the world prior to 1974-75.