The key ingredient: A Wknd interview with Madhur Jaffrey

Madhur Jaffrey, 89, insists she’s not actually a cook; just an actor playing the part.

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She never trained as a chef, doesn’t chop her onions evenly, only cooks what a homemaker would for her family. (What she did study, she points out, is acting; she spent years on TV, writing, acting and presenting.)

Yet, this year, she became the first person of South Asian origin to win the prestigious James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award. This comes a year after the Government of India awarded her the Padma Bhushan, the country’s third-highest civilian honour.

“They are both pinnacles to my career, and I feel very honoured,” Jaffrey says. “I’ve been working steadily, so it’s nice to be recognised. Not that I was looking for it. But it feels really warm and wonderful to know that other people are watching and listening.”

People have been watching and listening for a while now. Jaffrey is credited with teaching the West how to cook Indian food. Over 50 years, she has published dozens of cookbooks. Many, including her first, An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973), have been bestsellers. They are known and loved for the depth of detail in the recipes, and the historical context woven into the notes on the dishes and ingredients, which themselves represent the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent.

Jaffrey had a rich career in television too, presenting Indian food to a British audience at a time when the latter, despite hundreds of years of colonial rule, still described this country’s complex tapestry of cuisines with the single word “curry”. Jaffrey’s BBC shows — which included the popular Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery; 1982, and Madhur Jaffrey’s Flavours of India; 1995 — broke new ground. It was rare to see a mainstream TV show about this cuisine, and even rarer to see one hosted by an Indian.

It helped that she was already famous to a degree. Jaffrey got her big break in the 1965 Merchant-Ivory film Shakespeare Wallah. As an actor, she is still best known for her role as the envy-ridden Bollywood star Manjula, for which she won a Silver Bear for best actress at the Berlin International Film Festival that year.

A year before that big break, a divorce from actor Saeed Jaffrey had left her with three children to care for. There was little money to be made from the limited roles available for an Indian actress, so Jaffrey began to write about food and travel and began to conduct cooking classes, to supplement her income.

She would marry the violinist Sanford Allen in 1967 (they remain happily married), but the passion for food held. It allowed her to be a “one-woman band” as she puts it.

“I do everything myself. I shop, I cook, I clean, I write, I clear up, I edit. I travel, and I love it. I never accept any help because I don’t trust people to do it as well as I can.”

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Born into an affluent joint family home in Delhi, to a ghee factory manager named Raj Bans Bahadur and a homemaker named Kashmiran Rani, Jaffrey was the fifth of six children.

Food, prepared by cooks under the supervision of the women of the house, forms an indelible part of her memories of that time. “You remember the smell of the Basmati rice and the moong dal cooking in the kitchen and how that meant that your hunger was going to be satisfied very soon,” Jaffrey says. “That was a very basic taste which I grew to be nostalgic about and love. Even today, if you give me moong dal and Basmati rice and a little achar of some sort, I am so happy. I don’t need anything else.”

Jaffrey picked up a ladle for the first time after she left home at 19, to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London in the 1950s. While she trained to become an actor, she taught herself to cook from recipes her mother sent by post from India.

She became passionate about cooking. An article in The New York Times in 1966 was headlined Indian Actress is a Star in the Kitchen, Too. Though hers were not the first Indian cookbooks aimed at the Western audience, she demystified Indian cooking effectively, and wove in personal stories and historical context, having travelled across the country to research recipes and cuisines.

Her daughters Zia, Meera and Sakina now help, particularly in the legal procedures around her work. There’s still so much to teach people about Indian food, Jaffrey says.

She still acts too. She had a role in an episode of And Just Like That… (2021) and had a recurring role on the 2018 show I Feel Bad. In 2019, she played American rapper Mr Cardamom’s potty-mouthed grandmother, in the music video for his song Nani.

“He showed me the words and the words were… you could say pretty daunting. They were dirty words,” she says. “But, you know, I’m an actress. I’ve played Lady Macbeth. I’ve committed murder. Doesn’t mean I’m a murderess, it just means I’m playing a part. And so I said yes to him, immediately.”

She also still cooks, though not every day. “I made a mushroom ragu and polenta yesterday. There was a lot, so I’m going to pack the polenta into a loaf and brown it on both sides, and use the same ragu today. Sprinkle a little parmesan on it and we’re good to go.”

And she’s working on a book. “There’s always a lot to be done,” she says. “But at my age, I just take it a little slow.” She pauses and smiles. “A little too slow.”

SLICE OF LIFE

* Madhur Jaffrey, 89, is an avid gardener and grows some of her own food. In her garden in Upstate New York, the daffodils and narcissus that she used to associate with Kashmir are everywhere. “Within the next month, we will get the vegetables into the ground. I grow everything, from tomatoes, peas, beans and beets to ghia (bottle gourd). I love ghia in dal,” she says.

* She likes “a little chilli in everything”. “I’ve just grown fonder of it with age… I also rather like avocado on toast, with a squeeze of lemon juice and a bit of chilli powder,” she says.

* Among Indian foods, one category she doesn’t like very much is the sweets. “We had access to every kind growing up, and I grew tired of it,” she says. “I never developed a sweet tooth, perhaps as a result of that.”