I developed an emotional attachment to food, says culinary queen Madhur Jaffrey in Lahore

The audience was taken on a gastronomical journey when London-based chef and cookbook author sat down with 82-year-old Indian award-winning actress, culinary legend and TV personality Madhur Jaffrey in a session titled ‘The Woman Who Took Curry Global’.

In her 40 years of writing recipes and cookbooks, Madhur told the audience, she had tried and cooked food from almost all over the world. “I’m a one-woman band. I do all the prep myself. I don’t have anyone to cut vegetables for me because only I would know the exact cut and size I want, nobody shops for me or knows the temperature I want a certain thing to cook at. And that’s what I suggest everyone do,” she shared.

Madhur spoke to a packed hall in both English and Urdu adding in between amusing anecdotes from her many journeys around the world.

Having around 20 cookbooks, some bestsellers, to her credit, the ‘master chef’ said she would never have anyone write recipes for her. “You should always watch and learn. Don’t ask someone to write it down for you. You may not get name of an ingredient right, how to stir, what temperature/flame to cook at or the taste of something important for the dish. You could know the names but will never get it right till you’ve seen how it looks or tasted for yourself.”

Madhur said she was a “sympathetic teacher” as many have learnt cooking from her. But she said once she was also tested if she could make a fluffy puri in a short time and she was extremely stressed if it would even fluff in that time, but, she heaved a sigh of relief, that it did.

For one of her books on Indian cooking, Vegetarian India, she took trips all over India to even the remotest places to collect recipes, taste and see for herself how local dishes were cooked. In Bengal, she said, she followed a chili picker woman to see what was in her lunchbox, how it was prepared and what it tasted like. “I developed an emotional attachment with the food I tried due to which I was able to jot their recipes down. And then there were lovely pictures with them too.”

About how a person’s palate is developed, the cookery queen said the process started from childhood. She then shared memories of her childhood when along with her cousins she used to sit on the branches of trees and eat pickled unripe mango.

Throughout the session Madhur shared her experience with food from various parts of the world, adding that she loved travelling. She told the audience one should travel as much as possible as it helped one learn and that “a person never stops learning”.

Answering a question at the end, she said her favourite dish was daal and that she’d be “in heaven” when served with a delicious daal with rice, yoghurt and chutney.

Published in Dawn, February 22nd, 2016