Having a meltdown

Everyone's obsessed with Butter Chicken Ice-Cream. But look past the fuss. You'll find science, history and emotion

- 

The popular adage is that the internet never forgets. This may or may not be true. But here's another adage that may be more suited to our times: Social media never remembers.

This is especially true of food, now that it has become a social-media obsession. For instance, there has recently been a huge hoo-ha about butter chicken ice-cream. The sudden surge of interest and the many polarising responses that followed the posting of a video on Instagram from a 'content creator' called Juliette Moreno came from people who don’t know any of the background.

In the video, Moreno takes butter chicken, adds lots of dairy, keeps the mixture in the fridge overnight and then puts it in an ice-cream maker.

And Hey Presto! She ends up with Butter Chicken Ice-Cream.

On social media, the common response is that this is a terrible, yucky idea. Who could imagine an ice-cream that tastes of butter chicken? The world doesn’t need such a weird dish. And so on. None of this should come as a surprise to Moreno, who says in her bio that she likes 'cooking without rules'.

What fun, yeah?

Well yes and no. Because Butter Chicken Ice-Cream is an old dish, and there are actually quite clear rules about how it is made. And all savoury ice-cream, which dates back a couple of centuries, also follows long established rules.

To take Butter Chicken Ice-cream first. I remember it from Rasoi, the Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in London, where it first went on the menu 22 years ago.

It was one of the many dishes that established chef Vineet Bhatia as one of the world's greatest exponents of modern Indian cuisine.