Madhur Jaffrey’s “Vegetarian India: A Journey through the Best of Indian Home Cooking”

My first Madhur Jaffrey cookbook – Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking (BBC, 1982) – was a gift from my aunt Marion, who knew of my passion for food from India. Over the years, I’d begged Indian friends to teach me their favorite recipes. Yet, I always found Ms Jaffrey’s to be more inspiring and real somehow. The truth of this came when I cooked coconut rice for a potluck dinner held by one of the women who worked in my husband’s office. His boss came from Bengal and his wife – a former Bollywood film star – owned several restaurants in Delhi. I did not know they would be at the potluck, so I forged forth with the coconut rice. Imagine my chagrin when they showed up! How could I be so presumptuous to cook Indian food and expect them to eat it? But they ate some of the rice out of politeness, then went back for more, and asked who had cooked such a delight. I raised my hand and they gushed, saying that my dish tasted very much like what they were used to, and how amazing it was that I, a foreigner who’d never stepped foot in India, could capture the essence of flavor as I did, based on Ms Jaffrey’s recipe in At Home with Madhur Jaffrey (Knopf, 2010).

Given their reliability, I added a few more of Ms Jaffrey’s sixteen cookbooks to my collection over the years: Flavors of India, From Curries to Kebabs, A Taste of India, Curry Nation, Madhur’s Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian, and – of course – At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. All these books tugged me into the kitchen and made me into a passable cook of quite realistic food from India.

Unfortunately, Ms Jaffrey – also a well-known film actress – does not include that recipe for coconut rice in her latest cookbook, Vegetarian India: A Journey through the Best of Indian Home Cooking. However, there’s much to chew on here, as Vegetarian India shares much in common with Julie Sahni’s Indian Regional Classics: Fast, Fresh, and Healthy Home Cooking (Ten Speed Press, 1998), as well as timeless standouts such as Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking (William Morrow, 1985) and Yamuna Devi’s The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking (E.P. Dutton, 1987).

One of the best recipes in Vegetarian India: A Journey through the Best of Indian Home Cooking turned out to be “Roasted Cauliflower with Punjabi Seasonings.” Ms Jaffrey took a standard recipe, in which a cook usually fries spice-marinated cauliflower flowerets, and turned it into something that roasts in the oven while you attend to a multitude of other tasks in the kitchen. The result can only be described as stupendous. Paired with plain yogurt, a touch of hot mango chutney, and flakey paratha, there’s nothing better for a light dinner, accompanied by Ms Jaffrey’s Orange and Radish Salad and her Cabbage Fritters. All recipes worked out fantastically well.

The whole book is refreshing, inspiring, and invigorating, with many unusual dishes clamoring to be tried. Perhaps one of the most amazing things that Ms Jaffrey makes clear is the sheer size of India, with its seemingly infinite number of cuisines. On one of her travels across India, she covered 645 miles from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, stymied by traffic – ‘camels to bullock-carts to overcrowded, careening buses … [I]n Andhra alone, there were at least five distinct cuisines to be studied’. And that’s just one relatively small section of a terribly vast country. By her own reckoning, she has collected hundreds of recipes yet to be shared with readers like you and me. She remarks, “I have to see the dish cooked in front of my eyes.” Right there is all the credibility I need, the authority that gives Ms Jaffrey’s book the street creds it needs to stand out among the plethora of cookbooks spilling out of publishers’ doors.

But a few other stories must be told in order to appreciate the magnitude of Ms Jaffrey’s work and the Queen’s awarding her a CBE.

Ms Jaffrey first savored food – a taste of honey – when her grandmother wrote “Om (meaning ‘I am’) on her tiny tongue, using her little finger dipped in honey to trace the words in Sanskrit. Yet, for someone who’s become a world-famous culinary star, Ms Jaffrey did not learn to cook in her grandparents’ house, where seating forty members of their extended family was a common occurrence. In a memoir of her upper-class Delhi childhood, Climbing the Mango Tree (Knopf, 2006), she describes the cooking lessons in her school, where, after Partition in 1947 and the end of the British Raj, students were still cooking ‘British invalid food from circa 1930 and not much else. Blancmange still loomed large’. Needless to say, she failed the cooking curriculum when the surprising final exam turned out to be cooking a dish with potatoes and onions, Indian-style. It wasn’t until Ms Jaffrey arrived in London as a student, homesick and longing for the flavours of home, that she began cooking, by following her mother’s instructions, unhindered by the distance between London and Delhi, via letters and phone calls.

From that first taste of honey to sixteen cookbooks, Ms Jaffrey has indeed journeyed far. Vegetarian India: A Journey through the Best of Indian Home Cooking is proof of that.

Vegetarian India, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2015, 421 pages