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Madhur Jaffrey Interview
By Malcolm Jolley
Gremolata: Is
Climbing the Mango Trees a food memoir?
Madhur Jaffrey: I
have no idea what it is officially. It is a memoir with a lot of food in it. I
wasn't trying to write about food, actually. I was just trying to write about my
life as a child and there's so much food in it that it sort of comes in
automatically.
Gremolata: The food sounds fantastic. In some ways, I
thought, the food you describe eating in the 1930s is thoroughly modern. It's
all organic, you know exactly where it comes from...
Madhur Jaffrey:
Well, you see that's the thing: nobody knew all those words then. But
everything was fresh, from a nearby farm or our own garden. The milk would come
that day from our own cows. It was assumed that that was the right thing to do
things. If you begin reading, you'll see that the old Ayurvedic system of
medicine has been saying forever that you should eat things that are grown close
to you, that are grown properly. You know, all that which we know call organic
and these wonderful newfangled names for it: that was the way to do things.
There was no other way to things in India.
Gremolata: Does all that
remain?
Madhur Jaffrey: Some of it remains, but the country as a whole is
slowly being
Monsantofied, or whatever seeds are coming from the West. It's all
changing and there's havoc as a result. So, we are also having to say, "Stop,
stop, stop. Let's go back."
Gremolata: Your memoir has an Arcadian feel
with the gardens, and going to pick out chickens, and all that. But the world
you describe is also very cosmopolitan and layered. From the centuries of
history, the various rulers in Delhi and their influences and then the influx of
refugees at the time of partition. The English, too - you're always eating
soup.
Madhur Jaffrey: Yes, I thought that English food was always soup;
that they had to get some liquid in them before they could get the rest of their
meal down!
But it's interesting. Sometimes when you are very specific -
and write, really, about Delhi and my growing up in a very specific kind of
circumstance - it becomes universal. In many ways what happens in one place
happens in another place and sometimes in the whole world. The whole conflict
that was to flare up between Muslims and Hindus, that was going to partition the
country had its origins way, way back when Islam first came to India. And
certainly, my family has historically lived through all the elements that made
up for the final partition of India: the Muslim element because my family worked
for the Moghul Emperors and the British, who my family also worked for after the
Moghul Empire crumbled (thanks to the British). When they took over my family
just shifted and many were working for them. Taking notes
Gremolata: This
is your caste?
Madhur Jaffrey: This is our caste: scribes, historians,
writers and accountants for 2,000 years. My whole theory is that we wanted to
read and write but we didn't want to be like the priests who read and wrote
religion. We wanted to have a bigger field, a more intellectual field and we
became scribes and maintained it. Until now - and it's ironic that I'm writing,
my daughter's writing and there are many writers in the family who just somehow
do it. They don't even think about it. Ink is in our blood.
Gremolata:
I'm skipping ahead of the scope of the book, but you left India for England to
become an actress, so how did you become one of the foremost authorities on
Indian food? A famous cookbook writer?
Madhur Jaffrey: I have no idea.
It's a total mystery to me. My grandkids dream of being chefs, but I had no such
dreams. No such dreams. And I don't call myself a chef, all I call myself is a
cook.
When I left India and couldn't cook at all at 20 I started writing
to my mother and she sent me back air letters, so I started with these air
letters and began cooking. And then, I came to America and, as promotion for a
film that I'd done, Craig Claiborne of the New York Times did an article on me
as 'an actress who like d to cook'. It was really about the film Shakespeare
Wallah, but from there these strange doors began to open. I didn't solicit any
of it - I always say I've been dragged kicking and screaming into the world of
food. It just happened to me: I kept making a very bad living as an actress and
a very good living as a writer about food.
Gremolata: A friend gave me
your Ultimate Curry bible, and I absolutely love reading it in bed. I mean I
love all the stories about the food. It's clearly very thoroughly
researched.
Madhur Jaffrey: Yes. I still do that. Research is the
greatest; I prefer that to writing, actually. I love going around finding and
discovering. That's the highlight of the book writing process for
me.
Gremolata: So how much of the memoir could you call up
then?
Madhur Jaffrey: It was a very funny process because when I was
asked to do it by my editor, more than 10 years ago, I said, "I can't. I can't
remember what I did yesterday. How will I ever write a memoir? I never even kept
diaries - nothing!" Even today, I can't think about what happened in the
past.
But then, I began thinking. I began thinking about he food that we
ate as kids, the emotional things attached to the food, and the food attached to
the emotions. Suddenly it came back in a rush. I just all poured
out.
There were things I couldn't remember, so I would call or email to
various brothers and sisters: what was the colour of that car in 1946? And each
would email me back a different colour. So, I thought, it doesn't matter! Memory
is totally selective. You remember what you want to remember, or what you think
you remember. It's no use, almost, asking anyone anything. So, from then on I
felt free to go with what I remembered. Though some things I still had to
consult my brothers and sisters about.
Gremolata: And is everyone happy
with the result?
Madhur Jaffrey: No! Of course not. That's why I don't
want to touch memoirs again. It's a Pandora's box.
Gremolata: But you
have to write the next book. The next chapter of your life.
Madhur
Jaffrey: Well that's it. I dare not because already there's enough people angry
with me. And you know, the people who are the angriest, I praise the most. I
think that people are just not used to being in print. And you somehow break
into their lives when you write about them you expose them in a way they don't
want to be exposed. Even when you think something is the least of things, you're
exposing them and I think it's dreadful for them.
I'm used to it, being
in the public. And I carefully shield what I don't want people to
know.
Gremolata: In the book you describe a fascinating life in terms of
being in a very interest place in a very interesting time: the last days of the
Raj, the Second World War, Independence, Partition...
Madhur Jaffrey:
Right. I never knew it was so. In retrospect, I suppose it is so, but when
you're living it, you're just living your life. I didn't think, 'I'm living in
historic times'. I was just so angry about the partition and so fearful of what
would happen. And then Gandhi's death. We were all great supporters of Gandhi,
great followers of Gandhi: my father, my mother, my brothers, all of us. And
then he was killed and we thought there's going to be chaos. What we stand for
is this kind of great tolerance and accepting everyone whomever they are. India
must be a secular nation, it cannot be a country of these people or that lot of
people. And suddenly it felt very threatened, all that. But somehow over the
years it's managed to stay, more or less, on an even keel, which is
amazing.
Gremolata: You're based in New York. You're on your third
continent.
Madhur Jaffrey: Right.
Gremolata: And you go back to
India often?
Madhur Jaffrey: I do. I do all the time. Most of my family
is there. As you know, I come from a huge family, so there are a lot of us
there.
Gremolata: One of the interesting food things in your book is when
you talk about partition and Punjabi refugees who brought all these wonderful
new foods like naan to Delhi.
Madhur Jaffrey: Which I had never heard
of.
Gremolata: In the west we assume that every one in India eats the
dame things.
Madhur Jaffrey: Yeah. We had never heard o f naan and to us
it was as exotic as it was perhaps to someone eating it for the first time in
Canada or Britain or in America or whatever. So, it's hard to explain to people
that India is the size of Europe. It's such a huge country and it's like Europe,
the differences like being in Sweden, then Italy or Spain, the Ukraine. The food
is just totally different. And that's the exciting part of India, for an Indian
too, travelling and eating. It's just great.
Gremolata: And this is still
happened to you, isn't it? You discover new foods.
Madhur Jaffrey: You
never stop learning about anything. Certainly not abut food in India; it's a
never ending process.
Gremolata: Is there something that
food-fashion-forward Westerners ought to be on the eye out for? A new dish from
India that hasn't been discovered?
Madhur Jaffrey: Oh, I would say there
are a million that have not been discovered. I was in an airport in Sri Lanka,
in Colombo, and I was talking to an Indian who was returning to India as I was
coming back to New York. She was from Andhra, one of the states in Southern
India, and she was telling me about the three distinct types of regional foods
from there and the various dishes. I didn't know any of them.
There's
someone else I know who is now the Governor of Arunachal Pradesh, which is in
the north and the east of India. It borders China. I've never been there and
would like to go because the food is totally different.
Even in places
where I've lived, people make dishes that I do not know! It's endless. It's been
going on for thousands of ears. It's not like American cuisine, or Canadian
cuisine, which id basically new. It comes for old sources, but it's basically
new. In Indian cuisine is so old and each family has its own dishes that have
stayed with them only for thousands of years.
Gremolata: So each family
has their own dishes and their neighbours...
Madhur Jaffrey: Would be
eating totally different things. Take mango pickle. It's not universal, mango
pickle. It's going to be different in each family.
Gremolata: This is
like de Gaulle saying, "How can you govern a country with 300 cheeses". It's
exponentially worse!
Madhur Jaffrey: Exactly!
Gremolata: Although,
when I read the book I recognise some dishes and spices, as someone who doesn't
know very much.
Madhur Jaffrey: The spices are the same. It's like a
palette of colours. Every painter has the palette of colours, but it's how
they're used. What is emphasised? What is the base oil? What spices are they
putting on the fore? What other ones are they putting in the background? How are
they breaking things up? And that makes all the difference.
Gremolata:
Are there violent disagreements about this sort of thing?
Madhur Jaffrey:
Within regions there's a history of spices being used in a certain way. But even
in our region, there's garam massalla, which is a mixture of aromatic spices
which Ayurvedically heat the body. It's used throughout North India, but
everyone, every family has there own mixture.
Gremolata: So when I go to
the super market and buy a jar...
Madhur Jaffrey: Forget about
it.
Gremolata: That bad?
Madhur Jaffrey: You can use it but what
happens in a jar is that they try to get the maximum profit for the minimum
input of spices so they fill it with the cheapest spices. In my spice mixture,
when I make garam massalla the most I have is cardamom seeds. That's one of the
most expensive spices. And there's cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, which are
expensive. They fill theirs up with more coriander and cumin, the cheaper
ones.
I know this because I use them and I know which the good mixtures
are, and even those you cannot use like my homemade mixture. So, sometimes in my
recipes I'll say, two teaspoons of the one you get from the market - it's fine
here. But for others, Ill say, you have to use my mixture and you need only a
half teaspoon.
Gremolata: So for the recipes at the end of the
memoir...
Madhur Jaffrey: These are the family recipes.
Gremolata:
Right. Could a novice start with your garam massalla and then expand on
it?
Madhur Jaffrey: Sure. Absolutely. That's what Indians
do.
Gremolata: Spices like coriander and cardamom seem to be popping up
on every fusion menu.
Madhur Jaffrey: I just went to Susur Lee's second
restaurant.
Gremolata: Lee's.
Madhur Jaffrey: Right, and he had
used cardamom seeds in a few things.
Gremolata:
Appropriately?
Madhur Jaffrey: Hmm. Well, I don't know. It's a question
of taste. I mean your palette, how you are putting these things together.
Sometimes it works beautifully, and sometimes - to my mind, and all minds are
different - it doesn't work so beautifully. I find, for example, the Swedes use
cardamom in their desserts. It's one of the main ingredients, like vanilla. They
must have got it very early on from, I don't know, Sri Lanka. Could be from
there. So they use it in their spice cakes and it's wonderful, to me a perfect
idea. But people are now travelling so fast and incorporating a whole lot of
things: coconut, cardamom, this, that... You have to be careful.
Gremolata: That's very diplomatic. I thought it was interesting that you
compare Indian food sensibilities to Italian. I'm thinking of the emphasis on
fresh produce.
Madhur Jaffrey: It's that. Also it's a grain based diet
like Italy. I think we have a lot in common: very fresh vegetables, at least in
homes. In Indian homes you get everyday one, or two, or three very fresh
vegetables, which are cooked very nicely and simply. That I think you find in
Italy.
It's a similarity of mind: you eat a lot, you sleep a lot, you
listen to good music. It's that way of thinking that Indians have as
well.
Gremolata: They've figured out how to live.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah. It's a wonderful way to live, actually, with good food as part of a way of
life, as opposed to adding it on at the end of the day.
Gremolata: For a
home cook who's not familiar with the traditions of Indian cuisine, where's a
good place to start?
Madhur Jaffrey: Start with the recipes at the end of
the book. But I always try and tell people, "Just don't try and make a whole
meal." You'll kill yourself and say that you'll never do it again. Take for
example the meatballs in this book. They're fairly complicated, so just make the
meatballs and buy naan from a shop and make a salad. And that's all: don't try
anything else. Make it a few times, then add an Indian vegetable dish, then add
a rice or a chutney, or a raita. But don't get overwhelmed. Make one dish many
times until you have grasped it.
Also, don't buy too many spices. Just
buy the ones you need for that dish.
Gremolata: Buy small amounts of
spices because they go bad?
Madhur Jaffrey: Well, if you buy them whole,
then they won't go bad. Only the ground ones. So get a coffee grinder for
grinding and grind in small quantities.
That's how I learned: literally
one recipe at a time. I kept doing them until I got it right. And then another
one and another one. So, I'm just passing on my method,
actually.
Gremolata: And, at the time, you would have been at the mercy
of English purveyors.
Madhur Jaffrey: Yes, but everything was coming in.
If you look at the 19th Century they were bringing things in. There was quite
available when I was a drama student and that was the late
50s.
Gremolata: So, no excuse, seek it out?
Madhur Jaffrey: Seek
it out. No excuse! Have will, will travel.
Gremolata: What's your next
project?
Madhur Jaffrey: Film and television continue: I'm just doing a
Law & Order this week. So that goes on. Cookbooks generally go on. I have
some cookbook offers that I will do, probably. But I think I might want to write
a novel. I just haven't decided. But I think that's where I am at the
moment.
Gremolata: My impression from reading the memoir is that you
enjoyed writing it.
Madhur Jaffrey: I did. I did.
Gremolata: And
will we see more of you in Gourmet?
Madhur Jaffrey: Absolutely. I'm going
to Sri Lanka and The Maldives to do a big piece. And I write for the Financial
Times, I do columns for them.
Gremolata: How many books have you
published?
Madhur Jaffrey: I have no clue. I would guess it's under 20.
You'll have to go with that!
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