Madhur Jaffrey is curled up in an armchair in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, looking faultlessly elegant in an ochre-coloured sari and a sleek bob. She is in Ireland to promote her new book, Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, but is quite happy to talk about the other things going on in her life - and oh boy, are there a lot of them. First up is a sizeable role in the forthcoming Joel Schumacher film, Flawless with enviable co-stars in the shape of Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman. Next on Madhur's schedule is Cotton Mary, a Merchant Ivory film in which she is taking the leading role as well as co-directing.
She has a lot to be proud of, and Madhur Jaffrey is certainly a proud woman. Her conversation is punctuated with statements such as "I am supremely qualified to compare, contrast and write about vegetarian food" and "There were so many things I could have done, I just chose to do acting", but unusually, there is nothing irritating about her manner. Observations such as these are simple statements of fact, neither boastful nor conceited but merely the findings of her fierce and analytical intelligence. Even if she were guilty of the sin of vanity, you cannot help but feel it would be excusable. The rollcall of Jaffrey's achievements is stunning in its breadth and quantity - most lesser mortals would be quite content with just one of the strings to Madhur's bow.
Now in her late 50s, Madhur Jaffrey has produced 13 best-selling cookery books and created countless television series that together were responsible for introducing the taste and passion for Asian cuisine to the home cooks of Britain and Ireland. Her work on the stage and in film is not quite so widely known, but she won a prestigious Silver Bear as best actress for her role in the 1964 Merchant Ivory film, Shakespeare Wallah and has numerous other films and TV series on her CV.
Then there are the children's books (three to date), her consultancy with New York restaurant, Dawat, and a range of cooking and serving products which she designed. Now World Vegetarian has been added to the ranks: more than just a cookery book, it is an indispensable reference book, recipe book, and could even lay claim to being a work of historical anthropology.
In a way, she has come full circle with this book, as she first dreamed up the concept when she was just becoming established as an expert in all things Asian in the late 1960s. "I wanted to do a book of vegetarian recipes from around the world, but I was told that my speciality was Asian food and I should stick to it. I was appalled . . . because the Indian cookery pieces did well, people expected nothing but Indian food."
Certainly there is an expectation with a book by Jaffrey that it will be Orient-oriented, but World Vegetarian is exactly what it says it is - a tome of more than 600 recipes from a huge range of international cuisines. A bible for cooks, it starts with a Genesis-type chapter that explains everything about vegetables, including how to cut them, recognise them, and identify their health-restoring properties. But it also contains the most complex series of Revelations on how to make couscous or paneer cheese from scratch.
The two elements that mark out Jaffrey's book as something a bit different from the rest of the cook-book bunch are the obscure diversity of the national cuisines it contains and its over-arching historical perspective. Inside its covers you will find Persian egg pie with herbs, from Iran, nestling alongside frittata with Swiss chard from Italy and Sri Lankan white egg curry. There are Japanese miso soups, Ethiopian hot sauces, Indonesian tempehs and Mexican bean casseroles all with the ingredients lovingly described with possible replacements should they prove impossible to find.
Despite the hugely eclectic array of recipes, there is a sense of cohesion imposed by Madhur's considerable knowledge of the foods she is writing about. A chickpea and potato curry that she learnt how to make in Trinidad is prefaced by a thoughtful paragraph on the culinary influence on Trinidad of the immigrant workers who travelled from India to the West Indies in the early 19th century. Anyone choosing to cook quinoa with tomato and thyme, learns that the grain was the "mother seed" of the Incas, before it was forcibly destroyed and eradicated by new rulers.
"It's a passion with me. I love food and I love to eat well but I also want to know why. Why do people eat what they eat? Why do dishes change? The whole philosophy of a dish changes because of what somebody does with it. I feel that somebody really must record it worldwide. Nobody else is putting it down; I am and it will be a record for all time."
To research the book, Jaffrey spent months travelling all over the globe tracking down contacts; people who could lead her to the perfect chickpeaflour pancake or bean-curd soup. Many of these stories go into the book and the recipes sport all manner of interesting names - Santha Ramanujam's coconut rice or Rosario Guillermo's quesadilla for example.
There is a constant supply of charming tales. There is the one about Madhur's mother sitting on the veranda choosing the day's vegetables from a large basket produced by the gardener, or another story about the curious manner in which her father ate fried eggs (all the white first then the whole yoke which was chewed in silence for 10 minutes).
It is fitting that World Vegetarian pays such homage to her family, as it was her mother who was responsible for sending Madhur down the culinary path. She describes her childhood as "Idyllic. We were a large family with a large piece of property in Delhi where we could grow everything we needed. There were cows and even horses so we could ride to school during the war when there was no petrol. My grandfather was a judge and in those days the whole city would move up to Shimla in the summer so the whole family - aunties and uncles and cousins - would go too. I didn't really face the real world until later when I was on my own."
That sea-change came when Madhur left India to train at RADA in London in the late 1950s. "It didn't seem such a big change because in my mind I was so independent. London and England didn't seem at all strange because I had seen it in every film and every play. I had acted in Shakespeare plays as a girl, I had read all the literature, it didn't seem like a land I didn't know."
However, Madhur had never cooked for herself before and soon she was sending an SOS to her mother for recipes. "I had a decent palate so I could recreate what I knew."
After RADA, Madhur moved to the US and shortly afterwards married actor Saaed Jaffrey who she knew well from back home in India. The pair had three daughters, the first in 1959, and worked together in the theatre world. It was at this stage that the Jaffreys first met Ismail Merchant and James Ivory and made plans with them to set up a company, return to India and put on plays. Not all those plans came to fruition, but Shakespeare Wallah was one result and Jaffrey has worked with them several times since. However by the late 1960s acting work was lean and Jaffrey turned to writing for "an income and something to do with myself".
"I didn't necessarily write about food - initially I wrote about music and dance which I knew much more about at that stage. But the food features were particularly well-accepted as nobody really knew about Indian food back then." A book contract followed in 1964 and after that the BBC started to make the TV series that were to really make her name. By that stage her marriage to Jaffrey had ended and in the late 1960s she married her second husband, violinist Sanford Allen.
The pair lives in New York and Jaffrey describes an idyllic family life to rival her own childhood. There are annual holidays to Italy or France - "Somewhere with good food" - and a month every summer in a big house by the sea in Martha's Vineyard. All three daughters come with husbands, boyfriends and grandsons (on whom Madhur dotes). "Everybody cooks, we never socialise at all, just sit down to eat meals together."
For all that her love of food and food history is almost evangelical, she claims that acting is her real passion and that her food writing career has sometimes been restrictive. "There were a few films I had to give up. I particularly remember one early on in my career that would have really changed my life around. But the BBC had a television series set up and they wouldn't change the filming schedule even by a few days so I had to turn down this big Hollywood film. It broke my heart. It was always, always acting, but I've made such a good living out of food and I love food, so I would never deny it."
Right now, she reckons her life is at a perfect balance. "Just when I said I'm not going to kill myself doing things I don't want to do because I'm in a position to pick and choose, things fell into place and directing this film came up."
She enthuses about her role in Flaw- less - "All my scenes are with De Niro as I play his doctor and then there's this really long party scene with both him and Hoffman". She is equally passionate about Cotton Mary. "It's about this Anglo-Indian woman who really wants to be white. She doesn't realise she wants something, she just doesn't know."
The interview is nearly over and Madhur Jaffrey stretches out of the chair. "Yes, I'm really happy right now," she says, a confident, self-possessed actor/writer/director/presenter, who by the way, can also cook a damn fine curry.
Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian is published by Ebury Press priced £25 in UK.