Who cooked up butter chicken? A court seeks the answer. Plus: Madhur Jaffrey's recipe

NEW DELHI, India – India's butter chicken lives among that rarefied pantheon of dishes that is well-loved at home and well-traveled: a smoky, cooked chicken smothered in a bright sauce of tomato, cream, butter and spices. It's been eaten by truck drivers at road-side stalls in rural India and by international glamourati like Jackie Kennedy.

Now butter chicken is at the center of a lawsuit over a burning question: Who gets to say they concocted this dish? The fight is between the grandsons of the two men who founded Moti Mahal, the restaurant where butter chicken was likely first served in India. "The suit has been filed to protect my family legacy," says Monish Gujral, the grandson of one of the founders. He wants the other grandson to stop claiming that his grandfather invented the dish. It's a weighty suit, with the family filing a 2,752-page long document to back their claims.

So where did this dish come from? Let's go back in time.

'Creamy, melty and delicious'

The two men who founded Moti Mahal shared a great deal, starting from the same first name: One was Kundan Lal Jaggi, the other, Kundal Lal Gujral. They were both cooks from the same hometown: Peshawar, in what is now northwest Pakistan.

The two men left Peshawar during the cataclysmic 1947 event known as Partition, when departing British rulers cleaved South Asia into a Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. Millions poured in both directions across that newly drawn border, Muslims to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs to India, all