COOKERY:In her new book, Madhur Jaffrey explains how to make full-flavoured Indian food without fuss, writes MARIE-CLAIRE DIGBY
THE TINY, BIRD-LIKE WOMAN with improbably dark hair and perfectly manicured toenails peeping out from sparkly FitFlop sandals, who is hovering over piles of prepared vegetables, has been on the go since early morning but shows no sign of slowing down. Madhur Jaffrey has been on breakfast television, raced across town to do a radio interview with Pat Kenny, and now, less than half a hour after leaving RTÉ, is chopping onions, grating garlic and rinsing basmati rice in front of a captivated audience at Cooks Academy, in Dún Laoghaire, Dublin.
“Be gentle with the rice. It is very delicate. Think of it as a soufflé. Once soaked, the grains are very breakable. In India we never waste rice; Buddha apparently lived on one grain a day,” she says, as she scoops up every last grain from the water in which she has left it to soak for 30 minutes before cooking. “Ideally, if the rice is good, the grains elongate to three or four times their length.”
Jaffrey, the authoritative voice and face of Indian cookery, and a celebrated stage and screen actor, is in the throes of a book tour, and her hectic schedule makes no allowances for her age. She looks at least a decade younger than her 77 years, and she is busier than ever, with two films coming out this year as well as the launch of Curry Easy, her first cookbook in seven years.
Some of the guests at the demonstration have arrived clutching much-used copies of Jaffrey’s first book, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, which has the rare distinction of being continuously in print since 1973 and has sold more than a million copies. When she wrote it she was also an established actor, having left her comfortable family life in an upmarket area of Delhi in the 1950s, at the age of 19, to take up a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
In acting terms she is perhaps best known for the films she made with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, including Shakespeare-Wallah, The Guru, Autobiography of a Princess and Cotton Mary, which she co-directed as well as playing the title role. But she has, for much of her working life, had a food career running in tandem with acting – writing books and newspaper articles, giving cookery classes and presenting food programmes on TV.
So is she foremost an actor or a food writer? “I see myself as an actress who cooks, but I studied to be an actress. I did not study to be a cook: it just happened,” she says, as if surprised by the turn of events. “But it’s lovely that I can combine both, and they are vaguely related, because you are reaching out, you are expressing yourself.”
Jaffrey has been based for most of her working life in the US. She has a farmhouse in Hillsdale in upstate New York, where she lives with her second husband, the violinist Sanford Allen. Her three daughters also live in the US. “My daughters are all wonderful cooks. None of them do it professionally, but I have a grandson who has just turned 18 and he has interned every summer either with a food magazine or at a restaurant. This summer he was at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’s restaurant in San Francisco,” she says with grandmotherly pride.
Despite living in the US, Jaffrey has also worked consistently in the UK, across a wide range of stage and screen productions, including joining the cast of EastEnders for six episodes in 2003, an experience that she seems to have enjoyed. “Oh yes, I loved them,” she says, smiling at the memory. “EastEnders I will never forget, because there was one scene that we shot – it was a wedding banquet for about 400 or 500 people – and they hired some big estate where they were going to film it. They filmed over four days, and the food was left out on the table. By the fourth day – it was summer – we all had to sit there and pretend it wasn’t rotting.”
Jaffrey’s new book is a departure from the 15 that preceded it. She has decided to let us in on her secret: how to make full- flavoured, authentic Indian food without fuss.
“My cooking has changed over the years. I am often as rushed for time as perhaps you are. I am always asking myself is there an easier way to do this? I am very busy; I need to have meals done within half an hour or 45 minutes.”
Jaffrey has devised a technique that replaces the labour-intensive browning of spices and meat in a frying pan with a less harried method involving overnight marinating and oven cooking. “I have simplified my cooking greatly. Now I find if I just marinate the meat with all the spices and seasonings and then bake it, both covered and uncovered, all the browning happens on its own; the curry absorbs the spices and is delicious. It’s doing exactly what it would do in a pan – except I can watch television while it is cooking.”
Curry Easy is published in the US under a different title – At Home with Madhur Jaffrey – a decision the author is not completely happy with. “My editor in America, the wonderful Judith Jones, hates the word easy; she can’t stand it. I pleaded with her to please call the book what I intended it to be. But in the end I bowed to her: she’s older than I am.”
Once the book tour is completed, Jaffrey has another project in mind; she wants to overhaul the menu at Dawat, the Indian restaurant in midtown Manhattan for which she acts as a consultant. “They haven’t changed the menu in ages, and I’ve been after them to move on.” Are there trends in Indian food she would like the new menu to reflect? “It’s definitely lighter, with more vegetables, more fish. I love vegetables, and when I get a meal that doesn’t have vegetables, I always feel it’s not a full meal.”
In New York she grows her own vegetables. “I bring back seeds from India. Don’t tell anyone! We have vegetarian meals about four times a week, and it doesn’t have to be Indian: it could be pasta . . . I cook everything: Italian, French, Japanese, Thai, Greek, Moroccan – and I love Korean.”
In order to get through her packed schedule Jaffrey has been chauffeur-driven around the city during her visit to Dublin, and is rushing back to her hotel for a 2pm checkout. She perks up as her driver tells her she is ahead of schedule. “Are we? That’s great,” she says with obvious pleasure.
She has already worn two outfits that morning, but she wants to change again, into “something elegant”, to have her photograph taken. But there are the paparazzi outside the hotel to deal with first. She suspects they’re not there specifically for her – Ben Affleck is their intended prey – but she smiles beatifically and rearranges her elegant embroidered shawl in any case as they snap her arrival.
Ever the lady, even after a gruelling morning. No wonder she needed to find an easier way to get dinner on the table.
Curry Easy by Madhur Jaffrey is published by Ebury, £20
