Fowlplay

Once, the early 1900s, there were two very succesful chicken farmers who maintained adjacent ranches in the state of Haryana. These ,of course, were real ranches with chicken, geese, other game and some goat as well. Not the kind of ranches in Gurgaon where rich Delhi kids get high on late night parties laced with ecstacy, and who knows what else. The proprietor of Ranch A was A.Sharma, and Ranch B was B.Varma. Ranch A Chicken were said to come from a Persian Lineage and apparently had been sold in the past to the kitchens of Bahadur Shah Zafar during the last part of the Mughal Empire. Ranch B was of the Broiler quality, very heavy on the flesh, but with some compromise on fullness of flavor..Lord Whathisname from England had set this up to replicate his Bird-Roast at the Supper Club in Blighty.

The two farmers were not friends, as you would expect, with each trying to one-up the other. The problem was solved when the following happened:

Some Arab sheikh on his travels advised the two fractious farmers to come up with a new lineage of Chicken, which would be a cross between the two lines. The Ranch A Cock and the Ranch B Hen and vice-versa. Surely,that would be the best of both worlds!! Indeed, the two farmers tried this and pulled it off marvelously thus winning an exclusive contract with the meat packing Sheikh worth millions of USD per year. The chicken was sold all over the middle - east reaching as far as Lebanon and southern Greece and Turkey.

Thus was born a popular mediterranean dish that goes by Chicken Shavarma.