Flair and flavour

Madhur Jaffrey takes a trip down the food-memory lane as her bestselling classic Indian Cookery turns 40

- MANDIRA NAYAR

Her karma was korma. At 20, when Madhur Jaffrey left home for London to enrol in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), she had never stepped into a kitchen before. But fate—and her homesickness-fuelled recipes for korma, kheema and other culinary delights—changed Indian cooking forever. And kitchens around the world opened their doors to Indian flavours.

Jaffrey, now 90, logs in five minutes before the online meeting is to begin. She is at her home in upstate New York, and behind her are fuchsia-coloured walls. “People told me it would look like a brothel. I said, ‘Wait till it is finished,’” says Jaffrey. She is dressed impeccably in pale turquoise silk, her sleek hair resembling a helmet.

She still cooks. “I was so feeling aloo chole with not much mirch masala. So that is what I made,” she says. She no longer does grand dinner parties. “I don’t cook 15 dishes. I can’t do that. But I will cook every day. We cook simple things,” says Jaffrey.

At the peak of its popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, the BBC show Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery had Britain come to a standstill at 7pm every Monday. The story goes that the day after Jaffrey made ‘lemon coriander chicken’, the Manchester supermarkets ran out of coriander. At a time when Indians were not yet visible on television, the sight of the sari-clad Jaffrey with her crisp British accent revolutionising Indian cooking was powerful.

“I was interested in life in every aspect. So I could portray anything.” she says. “They knew it as a cultural programme—learn more about Indians, customs and Indian food. I think what carried across was my enthusiasm for everything, and my abilities as an actress.”