“I am my own shopper, cook and cleaner”
MADHUR JAFFREY, THE FIRST LADY OF GLOBAL INDIAN CUISINE, ON FILMS, FOODS AND MORE
She’s played a princess and a prima donna. She’s cooked in borrowed New York apartments and in studios under TV lights. The first lady of global Indian cuisine. And the first among actors to cross over. Few can lay claim to both firsts but then Madhur Jaffrey is no ordinary woman. Clad in black leather pants, boots, velvet jacket and pashmina shawl, the 84-year-old looks every inch the princess she played in Merchant Ivory’s Autobiography of a Princess, give or take a few lines on a striking face. Here the only Indian winner of Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival in 1965 for her role in
Shakespeare Wallah—in what critic Kenneth Tynan called a ravishing study in felinity—speaks to Kaveree Bamzai on films, food and Ismail Merchant.
You were the silent partner in the extraordinary trio of Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, one of the most famous partnerships of moviedom. In fact Merchant and Ivory met at your home in New York. How was it?
Ismail could make you do anything. He would call you for a meal and then step outside to buy groceries. He would invite you to a party at Cannes and then make you shop and cook for him. But we wouldn’t mind. He would persuade you to do a film then and pay you very little. But we would do it because we loved him.
How did you start cooking?
When I went to England as a student in 1955 to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art,
I was so miserable that my mother started sending me these airmails with recipes for simple dishes such as aloo jeera. In New York, it was Ismail’s idea to invite The New York Times’s food critic Craig Claiborne to profile me as an actress who cooks—I had to borrow a friend’s home. The result was a piece that put me on the path of food forever: Indian Actress is a Star in the Kitchen Too. I have yet to write a recipe that I haven’t cooked or tasted myself. Even now, whenever I call people home in New York, I am my own shopper, cook, cleaner. But of course Indian food is far more evolved now internationally than it was. When I wrote my first book I had to leave out things like asofoetida because my publisher said no one will understand this. By the second book, I decided to stick up for what I thought was right otherwise things would never change.
Diversity is very big in movies and TV now. Your daughter Sakina for instance played a Latina in The House of Cards. Not then.
Right. Here was I looking like myself and speaking English as I had been taught at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. There weren’t too many parts for someone like myself. Things have changed quite a bit since then.