Madhur Jaffrey Learned to Cook from Her Mother’s Letters
Her mother mailed Delhi recipes in Hindi. They became the 1973 cookbook and the 1982 BBC series.
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Madhur Jaffrey learned to cook Indian food in a London bedsit, from letters her mother sent from Delhi. She had grown up eating that food in a house where she almost never cooked. The sheets were airmail, the recipes in Hindi. They became An Invitation to Indian Cooking in 1973, and the BBC series that in 1982 put a Delhi kitchen into British homes.
She was born in Civil Lines in 1933, the fifth of six children in a Mathur Kayastha family, a Delhi community whose households often kept cooks. Hers did. She has said she barely went into the kitchen, and that she nearly failed cooking at school. In 1955 she arrived at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The canteen served gray roast beef and cabbage. She wrote home. On March 19, 1956 her mother answered with an egg curry, a cauliflower dish, and meat scented with cinnamon, cardamom, and bay. Potatoes with cumin were the first plate she got right. Chapati was still out of reach, so she bought pumpernickel from a Jewish bakery nearby and ate her dinner on that.
A film role is what brought a food editor to that kitchen. In 1965 she won the Silver Bear for best actress at Berlin, for Shakespeare Wallah. Ismail Merchant, who produced the film, asked Craig Claiborne, the food editor of The New York Times, to come see an actress who cooked. The profile ran in 1966. The book took five more years. She knew the taste and had almost never measured, and the recipes had to work in an American apartment. Judith Jones, the Knopf editor who had published Julia Child, asked her to add menus for someone who had never eaten this way. Jaffrey used the introduction to separate Indian cooking from the tin of powder sold as curry.
British cooks met the same kitchen on television. Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery began on the BBC in 1982, with a book beside the series. A weeknight from it is still easy to picture: cauliflower, a lamb gravy, rice boiled in an ordinary pot. She has said she started with Delhi because it was the food she knew, and that nobody really knows all of India. A Taste of India, in 1988, is the record of her going out to learn the rest. In 2023 the James Beard Foundation gave her its lifetime award, the first South Asian to receive it.
If this cooking is new to you, make the dishes those letters started with: potatoes with cumin, cauliflower and potato, and an egg curry. Measure as you go. She learned them by tasting against a memory and writing the amounts down so the next dinner would match. For the regions that plate does not cover, read Spice Literacy: How to Read a South Asian Kitchen.