Making the Cookbook: An Invitation to Indian Cooking

"This book has been written as a gradual maneuver of self-defense," Madhur Jaffrey wrote in the introduction to her groundbreaking 1973 An Invitation to Indian Cooking, expressing her exasperation with the limited number of Indian recipes available in the U.S. at the time. Then an award-winning actress, Jaffrey went on to write a modest mountain of cookbooks, most relating to Indian or vegetarian cuisine. Here, she explains how she introduced the world to Indian food.

I was an actress doing odds and ends with writing, but mainly acting. I was just beginning to feel that there’s no one that represents Indian food at all. Nobody talks about it, nobody knows what it is. And aside from this vague idea of “curry,” people have no understanding of the vast areas of regional variation within this world of so-called curry. I hadn’t really thought of doing a cookbook, but I had started cooking a lot, and entertaining people at home. As a result of a film that I had done called “Shakespeare Wallah,” for which I had won the best actress award at [the Berlin International Film Festival]—Craig Claiborne of the New York Times was asked if he would be interested in interviewing me as an actress who likes to cook. So he did. He did a huge write-up. Because of that, I was approached by a freelance editor who asked, "Would I be interested in doing a cookbook on Indian food?" And I said, Well, sure.

A friend approached Knopf for me. They called Judith Jones and said, "This is a cookery book and maybe you should look at it." She took a look and said, "Yes, I want the book." I thought it would take me three months to write it. I actually took five years. Because I’d never measured anything before. I didn’t cook at all when I was in India. And then I was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art as a student, and realized that there was no good food for me to eat—no Indian food to be had anywhere in Britain at that time. We’re talking about the 50's, late 50's. So I started writing to my mother for recipes, for simple things like rice and tea—I just didn’t know how to make anything.

I thought I would stick to the food that I knew really well, which was the food of my hometown, Delhi. The first cookbook is really the food I knew from my childhood, and that too, as I look back on it, was a smart decision, because it was a good way for me to start—to start with what I knew, and then go on to write about other parts of India, which I had to learn, because I didn’t know all of it. Nobody really knows all of India.

A lot came from my family. It happens that I have one sister who’s married to a Gujarati, so that takes me out of the Delhi area. I knew her food and her husband’s food very well. I had one brother that’s married to a Bengali, so I had a very close relationship with Bengali food as well. And then I had a cousin who is married to a Kashmiri. But the core of that first book is really the food of Delhi. In India, these things are very clear-cut: There are distinct regional foods. People speak different languages in different parts of India and have their own culture, and their own foods. So that was something new to get across: these vast variations within Indian food. I started with Delhi because that’s what I knew, and then in other cookbooks I went beyond.