An Invitation to Indian Cooking - Madhur Jaffrey [41]
To serve: Empty contents of pot into shallow serving bowl. Arrange the cooked lemon slices on top of the chicken pieces. Serve with any rice dish or with pooris or chapatis. Yogurt with Tiny Dumplings goes well with it. For vegetables you could serve Carrots and Peas with Ginger and Chinese Parsley or cauliflower or any other vegetable you like. Almost any kind of dal would also complement the dish.
Chicken with tomato sauce and butter
SERVES 6
The original version of this dish is to be had at the Moti Mahal restaurant in Delhi. There, the Tandoori Chicken is cut into small serving sections and put into a rich sauce of creamed tomatoes, butter, and spices.
My very inventive sister, Kamal, has worked out her own version, slightly different, but equally good. The Indian chicken being as tough as it is, what she does is to combine all ingredients—tomatoes, onions, ginger, garlic, butter, whole spices, and chicken sections—in a covered pot and cook them until the chicken is three-quarters done. By this time the meat has absorbed all the necessary flavors. Then she lifts off the cover and over a high flame stirs and fries the chicken and sauce until almost all the water evaporates and the chicken and pastelike sauce are a dark reddish brown.
This is very hard to do in America, because, as I mentioned earlier, the chicken is very tender and cooks too fast to allow all the flavors to be absorbed and the final frying to be accomplished without disintegration. So I have worked out a third version! Here it is.
4 chicken legs
2 chicken breasts
2 medium-sized onions, peeled and coarsely chopped
5 cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
A piece of fresh ginger, about 2 inches long and 1 inch wide, peeled and coarsely chopped
1 stick of cinnamon, 2½-3 inches, broken up
Seeds from 6 whole cardamom pods
8 whole cloves
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
2 bay leaves, crumbled
1 hot dried red pepper (or more, as and if desired), crumbled
6 tablespoons vegetable oil
16 ounces (2 cups) canned tomato sauce
1 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons lightly salted butter
Remove skin from all chicken pieces. Divide legs into drumstick and thigh, and quarter the breasts. Pat dry and put aside.
In the container of an electric blender, combine the onions, garlic, ginger, cinnamon, cardamom seeds, cloves, peppercorns, bay leaves, red pepper, and 3 tablespoons water. Blend until you have a smooth paste.
Heat the oil in a 10–12-inch casserole-type pot over a high flame. When hot, put in the chicken pieces, 4 or 5 at a time, and brown them quickly (about a minute on each side). Remove with a slotted spoon. You will need to brown the chicken in several batches.
Turn heat to medium and pour in the paste from the blender. (Keep face averted.) Stir and fry the paste for 5 minutes, scraping the bottom of the pot well as you do so. Now add the tomato sauce, ¾ cup water, and the salt. Bring to a boil. Cover. Turn heat to very low and simmer gently for 30 minutes, stirring every 6 or 7 minutes.
Add the chicken pieces to the pot, as well as any juices that may have collected. Bring to a boil, cover, and simmer over low heat for 25 to 30 minutes. Stir gently every 5 or 6 minutes to avoid sticking and burning. Be careful not to break the chicken pieces as you stir. (This much of the recipe can be made up to a day in advance and refrigerated.)
Cut the butter into 4 pats. Take the chicken off the heat. Drop in the pats of butter and stir them in gently. Serve immediately.
To serve: Place contents of pot in a warm dish and serve with Rice with Frozen Black-eyed Peas or naan. For vegetables, you could have Eggplant Bharta or Fresh Peas with Ginger and Chinese Parsley. You could, if you like, also serve Onions Pickled in Vinegar as they do at the Moti Mahal Restaurant in Delhi.
Chicken cutlets
SERVES 2
Breaded chops and cutlets were brought to India by its last conquerors, the French and the British. They passed