30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEMadhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery is the book that taught Britain how to cook Indian food, and it did so in a single year.
Madhur Jaffrey was an actress first. She trained at RADA in London and won the Best Actress award in Berlin in 1965 for Shakespeare Wallah. She never learned to cook at home in Delhi. She learned in London, by writing letters to her mother asking for recipes because the food in her student accommodation was inedible.
When the BBC made a television series with her in 1982, there was barely anything Indian in British supermarkets and curry meant curry powder. Instead, she explained that curry is not a cuisine but a British catch all term, that spices should be toasted whole and ground fresh, and that the order in which they are added changes everything.
The series and the book changed the industry. Within a couple of years, whole spices, fresh herbs and pulses were appearing in ordinary British shops because people had actually started asking for them.
The contents amount to a systematic course. Dals, curries, chutneys, breads and rice, plus a wealth of lesser known regional dishes, with the technique explained throughout rather than simply assumed. Tarka, spices fried in hot oil before being added to the dish, is her most transferable lesson, and it makes a difference in any kitchen.
This is the fortieth anniversary edition, hardback, with eleven new recipes and a new foreword.
For anyone who has cooked Indian food from recipes for years without understanding why the result never tastes quite like it does in a restaurant, this is the explanation.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
ISBN: 9781526659033
Language: English
First published: 1982, this edition: 2023
