Madhur Jaffrey is the accidental cook. “I have always been suspicious of my cookery career,” she says, “in the sense that I feel it’s not my real career. I can cook but I’m an actress.” Indeed she is. Famed for winning the best actress award at the 1965 Berlin film festival for her performance as a haughty Bollywood star in Merchant Ivory’s movie Shakespeare Wallah. But she is also very much a culinary trailblazer; a profound educator who took generations of western cooks gently by the hand and introduced them to the joys, subtleties, and regional variations of the India of her birth.
Next month sees the publication of a gorgeous 40th anniversary edition of her seminal book Indian Cookery, updated to include 11 new recipes. The original was groundbreaking in so many ways. It accompanied a 1982 BBC sleeper series of the same name, made by the education department, and went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. In the process, it created the market for the TV tie-in. More importantly, it introduced readers to the essentials of spice roasting and flavour layering; to dishes like “aubergine cooked in pickling style” and “lemony chicken with fresh coriander”.
“When they first asked me about republishing it, I wondered why,” Jaffrey tells me by phone from her apartment in New York, where she has lived for many decades. “It’s slightly dated but it is what it is. And then I started looking at it and I thought, you know, it’s not dated at all. It tells the same stories that I’m still telling.”
Some dishes have finally been given their rightful names. A recipe originally published under the heading “Lamb and rice casserole” is now simply a mughlai lamb biryani. In come missing recipes for pulses, including for tarka dal. “England has changed so much. You don’t have to explain to them what a tarka dal is. Everybody knows.”
For Rowan Yapp of publishers Bloomsbury, reissuing the book was about the past and the present. “My dad was a big cook and has all of Jaffrey’s books,” she says. “They are fully annotated with notes and scribbled ‘VGs’.” As a result, I cook from her too. But there’s also a lot of younger members of my team who weren’t as familiar with her work. The timelessness is obvious.”
It seems the Observer can also take a little of the credit. Indian Cookery was one of the significant cookbooks I wrote about during the lockdown of early 2021, when restaurants were closed. In that piece, I made the point that, shamefully, Indian Cookery was out of print. Yapp decided it was time to rectify that.
Jaffrey has just turned 90, and now has dozens of editions to her name, including pioneering volumes on Indian vegetarian cookery, and others covering the food of the wider subcontinent. In recent years she has received lifetime achievement awards from the UK’s Guild of Food Writers and the James Beard Foundation in the US. Even so she still marvels at her own culinary origin story. Jaffrey was born in Delhi and raised by her cinephile father on the British movie classics. Eventually, in 1955 she came to London to study drama at Rada. She was so appalled by the food – a meagre offering still scarred by the privations of wartime rationing – that she asked her mother to send recipes from home.
Somehow, despite the scarcity of ingredients and her mother’s sparse shorthand, Jaffrey managed to pull the dishes together. “I really am amazed at that woman,” she says now of her younger self. “I suppose I had whatever it took to go looking for those ingredients. I think it was a deep, deep homesickness and a desire to get back to both that emotional India that I knew, and to my mother.” She attributes her ability to build out the recipes from such scant instructions to simply being blessed with an acute palate. “I marvelled at it for years without understanding what was happening,” she says. “As I got older, I realised that I was not only tasting everything but also recording it. Those tastes go into the brain like a computer. They are there, stored and if you really have stored the tastes, you can recall them which means you can recreate them.”
By the early 1960s she was living in New York with her first husband, the late actor Saeed Jaffrey. She had already made the film Shakespeare Wallah, about a troupe of English actors taking the bard’s works across India, playing opposite a 17-year-old Felicity Kendal, whose Anglo-Indian acting family was the direct inspiration for the movie. The director Ismail Merchant wanted publicity for the film and so introduced her to Craig Claiborne, the food writer of the New York Times. Jaffrey cooked for him and he wrote about her. That brought her to the attention of Judith Jones, the editor of Julia Child at publishers Knopf. That led in 1973 to her first book, An Invitation to Indian Cooking.
In turn, when the BBC was looking for someone to front an Indian cookery show, Jaffrey’s name was suggested. It’s no overstatement to say that Britain stopped every Monday night at 7pm for the run. To the Britain of the early 1980s, she was a magnificent spectacle, with her vivid textiles and exquisite poise, as if what she was doing with those pans and novel spices was as easy as breathing. Today, Jaffrey acknowledges that it was her skill as an actor which made her so effective as a TV cook. “The desire to communicate is that of an actor and it very much came in handy,” she says. “You want to involve the audience, to speak directly to them and to tell them: ‘Look, this is what I’m making. Try it. It’s really good.’ It is that communication from one person to another that an actress learns to do.”
She revels in the impact it had. “One day I made chicken with coriander. I later heard that all the coriander in Manchester had sold out overnight. People watched the show in the evening and cooked the dish the next day.”
We tend at these crowning moments in an icon’s career, which by any measure Madhur Jaffrey has become, to view the world from the mountain top. But, she says wryly, the ascent was not always easy. Early on, she very much felt pigeonholed as a brown person who could write only about brown people’s food. “I wanted to write about Italian food 50 years ago,” she says. “They said: ‘No, you can’t. You’re Indian. You write about Asian food.’ And I thought: why? I know just as much about that as I do about Thai food and they let me write about that, but they won’t let me write about Italian food when I’ve been there so many times.” By contrast, she says, white people were allowed to write about Italy, despite having little knowledge. Happily, she says, things are improving. “I know people of Indian heritage who write for the New York Times and they can write about anything. I was there too early. I was an oddball.”
Not that she approves of everything in the world of food and recipes today. She surveys it with the eye of one who has seen many things come and many things go. “I’m appalled by certain aspects of what is going on,” Jaffrey says. “I think people are learning too fast. They get a recipe from Thailand, from Laos, from Korea, and then they begin picking at it and taking bits and pieces of it and putting it together and creating new recipes which they think are very exciting. I disagree. They are emotionally incomplete. The influences are too … ” She hunts for the right word. “… undigested. It’s too fast. They are putting it all together in a way that doesn’t make any emotional sense to me.”
Then again, when Madhur Jaffrey enthuses, boy does she enthuse. I ask whose recipe writing she likes. She talks excitedly about Jamie Oliver; his food works, she says. “Whatever he puts together I usually end up liking very much.” But she saves her most effusive praise for the Guardian columnist Meera Sodha, the author of three cookbooks including Made in India and East. “Meera is just wonderful. She sees things so clearly.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the love is returned. “I adore her,” Sodha says simply, with a sigh. She credits Jaffrey with providing her own mother with a massively positive role model through her TV appearances, when Indians in the public eye were a rarity. She also says Jaffrey’s books helped her learn to cook. “She is still the standard bearer for regional Indian food,” Sodha says. “I don’t think anyone is as good at introducing recipes through stories as she is. She narrates those stories with incredible wit and knowledge. She’s almost a social anthropologist when it comes to food.”
Today, Jaffrey is finally coming to understand her dual career. She does still act occasionally. In 2018 she played the mother of a woman trying and failing to live up to her own high standards in I Feel Bad, a sitcom which ran for one series on NBC. The following year she played a hip grandma in the video for Nani, a track by a rapper from Queens called Mr Cardamon. “If you’re an actress you have to play everything,” she told the New York Times simply during the shoot. “I think I am finally making peace with these two parts of my life,” she tells me. “I just never accepted the cookery part of it as anything serious but I’m beginning to think that it’s just as serious as anything else I’ve done.”
I ask her how she feels about these early recipes of hers going out into the world and finding new readers. “They’re like children, all those recipes,” she says. “You can’t choose between them. That’s the wonderful thing about them.” On the day we talk she was not far off her significant birthday. I wonder if she still likes cooking. “Oh yes, I still like to cook, but I am almost 90 and I’m having a lovely big party,” she says. “So I’m going to celebrate. But the trouble is that at 90 you get tired from the chopping and washing up. I prefer my own hand at cooking but if I’m cooked for by someone whose hand I like, I’m very happy.” And if it was a dish from Indian Cookery? “I still love the pickling spice aubergine. It’s a wonderful recipe. I would love it if somebody made it for me, right now.” Let’s just hope the great Madhur Jaffrey got her birthday wish.
