Chef Calum Franklin has recast a Birmingham-inspired chicken balti as a pie, using frozen roti paratha for its crust and serving it with a spicy coriander-and-mint chutney. The recipe appears in a Guardian feature published as an edited extract from his book, The Modern Pie Maker.
Franklin says the dish draws on late-night balti meals from his student years, when he and Lewis Walker were at University College Birmingham. That account is Franklin’s recollection; the available material does not independently verify that the two shared those meals.
A pie built around balti flavours
The recipe brings together a chicken balti filling, paratha pastry and a fresh green chutney. Franklin’s feature frames the curry base around tomatoes, onions, peppers and chillies. That is his recipe guidance, rather than a universally established definition of balti: accounts describe variation in the dish and its preparation.
The paratha gives the pie a different format from the balti curry that inspired it. The chutney, made with coriander and mint, accompanies the richer filling and forms a separate part of the recipe. The feature presents these elements as a personal interpretation, not as a definitive version of either balti or pie.
Birmingham roots, with room for variation
Balti is associated with Birmingham’s food history and with Pakistani-Kashmiri cooking. The Guardian places its emergence in the city in the 1970s. Independent background accounts from National Geographic and Visit Birmingham also trace the dish’s development to Birmingham in the mid-1970s, describing it as shaped by Pakistani culinary influence.
Those accounts support a broad history, but they do not identify one uncontested inventor or establish an exact origin date. The Guardian’s suggestion that balti was “apparently created as a way to appease the British palate” is tentative and should be understood as an attributed explanation, not settled history.
The available background also cautions against treating any one list of ingredients as a rule for every balti. Franklin’s combination of tomatoes, onions, peppers and chillies explains the base used in his recipe. It does not resolve how cooks or communities define the dish across its variations.
A personal route from curry house to cookbook
Franklin’s recollection connects the recipe to his student years and to the late-night balti meals he says he shared with Walker. The Guardian describes Walker as a senior figure at the college’s food department. University College Birmingham’s staff profile gives Walker’s current title as Deputy Head of the College of Food, a wording that differs from the description in the feature.
The story behind the pie is therefore both personal and local: Franklin draws on a memory linked to Birmingham, then adapts those flavours to the pie-making format of his book. The sources establish that connection as Franklin’s account, but do not show that this recipe represents a standard or traditional form of balti.