Indian cooking with Madhur Jaffrey

Jay Gohil

Rahul Jacob of the Financial Times has an interesting interview with Madhur Jaffrey, well known for her Indian cooking recipes. Here is an excerpt:

Jaffrey has spent the past five years taking plenty of notes as she criss-crossed the world to put together her latest book, retracing the journeys of the far-flung Indian diaspora to places such as South Africa, Trinidad and Malaysia. Curry is by now a globe-girdling phenomenon. Even Japan has a variety of it, she reports. Every Japanese supermarket has curry roux that comes in the form of something like a chocolate slab, which you melt into a curry sauce."

Indian food is increasingly part of the mainstream in New York and London these days, yet three decades after the publication of her first book, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, Madhur Jaffrey remains its most recognisable face. The New York Times has dubbed her the Julia Child of Indian cooking, the British media call her "the original Spice Girl". Jaffrey has written more than 15 cookbooks, with one of them – Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking – selling more than a million copies. (As it happens, that was the book I learned to cook from when I moved to New York from Calcutta in the late 1980s. Scarcely able to fry an egg when I started using it, I was soon emboldened to cook regularly for dinner parties.)

...In Britain and the US, Indian food has ended up with strange permutations and combinations. Chicken tikka masala, one of the bestselling dishes in supermarkets and restaurants in the UK, is unknown in India. Jaffrey recalls that tandoori chicken, the marinaded precursor of chicken tikka masala, was itself brought to Delhi, where she grew up, by new immigrants who moved there from what is now Pakistan after India was partitioned in 1947. "When tandoori chicken first came to Delhi, it was the most exotic of foods," she remembers.

It's also worth taking a look at ther book - From Curries to Kebabs

Comments

[martha]

I'm looking for a nan recipe. I've tried the one in Jaffrey's first book but it's nothing like the nan one eats in restaurants. Any ideas? I have tried to find an email address for Madhur Jaffrey, to no avail.