New Delhi: Be it your local Chinese take-away or any family restaurant, one would definitely find the ever-favourite dish – chicken manchurian – in the menu. The desi touch on this recipe of Chinese meatballs has been celebrated in India for a long time.
But when The New York Times reported chicken manchurian as a “stalwart of Pakistani Chinese cooking,” the Internet went berserk.
The article defined how the “recipe comes from attempts at recreating the version served at Hsin Kuang in Lahore, Pakistan, in the late ’90s”.
A stalwart of Pakistani Chinese cooking, chicken Manchurian is immensely popular at Chinese restaurants across South Asia. https://t.co/jorY16XePW pic.twitter.com/79hv3URnTm
— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 26, 2023
The tweet went viral right away with many users turning keyboard warriors, flooding the micro-blogging app with justifications on how the dish was from India. One Twitter user commented: “Since when is this a Pakistani dish?”
However, the NYT report also mentioned that Nelson Wang, a third generation Chinese chef who was born in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), is credited with inventing the dish in Mumbai in the 1970s.
Within minutes, the battle lines had been drawn and Indians and Pakistanis fought it out in cyberspace.
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