Madhur Jaffrey:
That’s what I yearn for is that aroma. That sunny, sunny, tropical aroma.
Kerry Diamond:
Hey, Bombesquad. Welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe, the show that's all about women and food. I'm your host, Kerry Diamond. For today's show, we have a special treat for you. It's Madhur Jaffrey, the culinary superstar. Madhur is an author, an actor, and a global ambassador for the cuisines of India. She's won awards for her work in both film and food, authored more than 30 books, and is a food TV pioneer, having taught probably millions of people how to cook over the years through her shows and videos. Madhur has led a life marked by curiosity and adventure. Last week, Cherry Bombe hosted a special Zoom meeting of our members and Madhur was our featured guest. She joined us to talk about Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India. Madhur's book is one of my favorite culinary memoirs and maybe yours too. Stay tuned for a special excerpt from our member meeting in just a minute.
Kerry Diamond:
I'd like to thank Sitka Salmon Shares for supporting Radio Cherry Bombe. Sitka Salmon Shares is a CSF, a community supported fishery. The Sitka Salmon Shares fish are wild caught in Alaska and the North Pacific by Sitka's fishermen and fisherwomen owners and their trusted partners. The fish are harvested in season, traceable to the source, blast frozen, and delivered to your door. I bought myself a premium share, because I wanted to see what the company is all about and support what they're doing. I received an email last week that this month's shipment will include Dungeness crab and Pacific cod. They have a projected harvest page where I can learn about the seafood that's coming my way. Sitka Salmon Shares also sent over some culinary tricks, always welcome, some suggested wine pairings, and an invitation to a members-only cooking class that's part of Sitka's Wild in the Galley series.
Kerry Diamond:
Sitka Salmon Shares has a special offer for you, listeners of Radio Cherry Bombe. Just visit sitkasalmonshares.com/cherry for $25 off the first month of a premium Sitka seafood share. The Sitka folks say it's the best tasting seafood you'll ever have, guaranteed. If you need the link again, just check our show notes. Some housekeeping. I mentioned earlier that our Madhur Jaffrey interview was part of a Cherry Bombe member’s meeting. The meeting also featured cookbook author, Hetty McKinnon, and Janell Lo, the blogger behind the Dump the Hate project. We also did some virtual networking, which is always fun. If you'd like to become an official member of the Bombesquad, visit cherrybombe.com. You'll receive invitations to special events like this one, be included in our member directory, and more. Thanks to those of you out there who are already members, and I look forward to seeing you at our next meeting. Now, here she is. The legend, Madhur Jaffrey.
Kerry Diamond:
Before we delve into the past, I wanted to talk about the present a little bit. And this is probably the question that everyone wants to know the most, but what have you been cooking?
Madhur Jaffrey:
You know, I'm stuck in the country and we grow our own vegetables in the country, so it depends on the season. Through the summer, last year, 2020, which was a horrible year in other ways, we had our garden all the time. So we had the tomatoes when we wanted them. We had the early peas when we wanted them. And there's a wonderful way that Indians cook peas. And this is maybe just not India. Everything in India is so specialized. So you take whole peas, and then in your wok, you put a little cumin seed, and you put a little asafetida, which is like truffles. And you put a tiny amount of both of those in the wok in a little oil, and then you put all the peas in. The whole pea. And you still fry 'til it's just done. And then you add a lot of mango powder, which makes it sour, and you put a little cumin powder, and, if you like, chilies, and that's it.
Madhur Jaffrey:
So then you take it out of the wok and you eat it like you eat artichoke leaves. You pull it between your teeth, so what you're getting are the peas, and you're getting the skin, the edible part of the skin. And you pull the two together and you eat it. And I don't know why the world doesn't do that. It's such a wonderful way to eat new peas.
Kerry Diamond:
What else are you growing in the garden?
Madhur Jaffrey:
Oh, everything. I have flat Roman green beans, which I eat at every stage. So I eat them when they're very young, just cut up and steamed or cooked slightly. And then as they get bigger and bigger and bigger and older, I stew them in a very Italian way with tomatoes, onions, and garlic, or I do them in an Indian way with cumin and coriander and turmeric, and things like that. But then the seed starts to fall. And you get them from the earliest stage when they're the youngest seeds and they get older and older and older 'til they're really hard and dry. So I get them and eat them in all their stages. It's just marvelous because you just don't get a vegetable at one stage, you get it in all its glorious stages.
Kerry Diamond:
Tomato came up so many times in the family recipes in Climbing the Mango Trees. And you have a very interesting technique that I've never tried. Can you tell everybody that?
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes. You cut a tomato in half and then you put it in your hand like this, with the cutoff facing a coarse blade. Not a fine blade, a coarse blade. And then you start grating on the core side 'til you reach the skin. And then what you're left with, it flattens out, until you're left with just the skin and that's it. Everything else has been grated into a pot and it's just delicious. It becomes a pulpy thing that you can just put into a dish. And the irony is that India didn't originate tomatoes, as you know, they came from the New World, and we didn't get them 'til about the 15th century. But we fell in love with them. We thought the chilies were wonderful, which we didn't own before. And we thought tomatoes were wonderful. And we just took hold and potatoes, we thought were wonderful. So we just made them our own. And now we have more potato dishes than I think anyone else in the world.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you have any fruits in your garden? Any fruit trees or any fruit?
Madhur Jaffrey:
I have the berries. I have yellow and raspberries, red raspberries, and pink raspberries, and I have a ton of blueberries. But I don't have any other fruit. Berries or my fruit.
Kerry Diamond:
And what do you do with them?
Madhur Jaffrey:
Eat them in every possible way. I mean, I just love blueberries as they are, just plain. But I do use them and because I have so many, I do use them up in cakes and muffins and things like that all the time. But basically, I just like to eat them.
Kerry Diamond:
Yum. And then get us really jealous, what's the herb situation?
Madhur Jaffrey:
Everything. Every herb you want, from sweet, some are savory, which I can't get in the market, which I love these herbs. And then I have the usual, tarragon, marjoram, everything. Everything. I grow everything. And I have a few plants on my patio as well. So the patio ones, I can go at night and just go to the patio and get the herbs I want, which are right there. I have chilies right there. And I grow everything from very hot chilies to the new habanada. You've heard about the habanada chilies, have you?
Kerry Diamond:
Wait, is there a new one? I haven't heard about a new one, but the regular habaneros.
Madhur Jaffrey:
No, habanada. You don't know about habanada?
Kerry Diamond:
No. Tell us about it.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Okay. So what they've started doing is grow the habanero with all that lovely aroma, that summer citrusy, gorgeous aroma without any heat. Without any heat.
Kerry Diamond:
What do you think of a pepper without heat though?
Madhur Jaffrey:
I think it's all right in its own place. I like that peppers with heat, but I like the aroma of that so much. The heat is too much for me. Can you imagine? A habanero is too hot for me, so I want some of that heat, but not all of that heat. So what I do is combine. I combine the habanada, which has the aroma, with as much of the cayenne or whatever else I want, or the Thai chilies, whatever kind of heat I want with the aroma that I can't get anywhere else. And that's what I yearn for, is that aroma. That sunny, sunny, tropical aroma. And they're doing that with a lot of vegetables now, they're specially growing them to get certain properties and certain qualities and not others. So it can be done. It's just a terrific science that allows you to do all this.
Kerry Diamond:
Like the honeynut is probably one of the most famous ones that they've grown. The miniature squash, yeah.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes, I grow that too. I've grown that also. Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
I have this picture of this amazing Eden that you have in your backyard.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Absolutely amazing. And I love flowers as well. So I have flowers. All the flowers I want. And I have all the vegetables that I really eat. So we grow what we eat.
Kerry Diamond:
Madhur, you're not on Instagram, are you?
Madhur Jaffrey:
I don't understand all this is. That is one thing that's beyond me, is technology. I know everything that can be done with the hands, but I'm not good at technology. I'm actually awful at it.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, we're lucky that you're with us on Zoom today. But just hearing you talk about your garden, I know if you ever have the time to master Instagram, we all would absolutely love to see pictures of that garden.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Oh, yeah. Well, I don't know how to master this technology business.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, the good news is, you know how to paint a beautiful picture with words, and everybody who has read Climbing the Mango Trees knows that. And Madhur, I was wondering if you could take us back and sort of set the scene. Now, this is about your childhood in India. And if you could just set the scene of your childhood, tell us what number seven is, and just paint a picture for us.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Well, I grew up in what we called a joint family. A joint family, which was several generations living together in one house, all under the eagle eye of my grandfather, who was a barrister, a lawyer, and a judge also, and he sort of controlled and kept all of us as his dependents. And we had one kitchen for everybody. So there were about 30 people who would all eat together. And it was set of three joint tables in the long dining room, which on one side face the river, and on the other side was the kitchen and everything else. So we all sat there, but I hardly knew what my grandfather was eating. He was at the other end. We children at one end and my grandfather and grandmother were at the other end. So it was a long time afterwards that I realized that my grandmother was vegetarian.
Madhur Jaffrey:
I couldn't see that far. And we didn't talk too much to her. We talked to the other grandkids who were near us and sitting all around us. So it was a wonderful kind of setting, bizarre because there were all kinds of minor favoritism between this person and that person, this mother, and that child. And the mother is there and the child is there, but things are being said to each other. It was a Baroque kind of unit, but it was this large unit. And we all sat together. So I start my book with my birth actually, because it was the custom in our family that the grandmother would come and write on the tongue with her little finger dipped in honey, and she would write Om, which sort of means I am. I exist. And that was rather nice. So this is what my grandmother did to me, but she did to all the grandkids.
Madhur Jaffrey:
And we were all born at home. We weren't born in hospitals. Until my time, we were born at home. And then I was named and I was named Madhur, which in my language means sweet as honey. So the honey theme is sort of repeated. And then my life went on. And here's the thing. When you are growing up in India, spices are so important. And you look at your elders and the teenage people in your family because you're living with all of them, and they're all chomping away and enjoying this hot, spicy, sour food, and you can't eat it because the little mouth can't take it. So it's like stockings, or you see your grownups wearing something. You say, "One day I'll wear that." So you have that kind of feeling. One day, I'll be able to eat the food. But you start building towards eating those foods because you're yearning for them, but you can't eat them because you're too little.
Madhur Jaffrey:
So what we used to do is we had mango trees, and green mangoes are sour. So we would climb up the trees, the kids. All the little kids. There were so many of us, of different ages. And then we would get the mangoes and we would slice them. Some older person would slice them, cut them into slices. And all of us gathered salt, pepper, cumin, and if we liked chilies, a little chilli mixed up in our little hands as we went up the tree. So when we'd get a slice, we would dip it in this mixture and eat it.
Madhur Jaffrey:
And that was the closest sign of being grown up. Yeah, we are. We can eat this. We are grown grownups. So it was a wonderful kind of feeling that you are learning to eat what the grown-ups eat. And they can eat spicy and sour and hot foods and you can't, but you can. I can. I will do it. Even though my eyes are watering and my nose is dripping, but I will eat those things. So the book starts with that, just the building up of flavor and taste, which every child starts with without almost knowing that they're doing that.
Kerry Diamond:
Now you did not like being told you couldn't do something from a very young age.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Oh, yes. Nobody could tell me that. There was nothing I didn't want to do. I wanted to do everything.
Kerry Diamond:
You were quite the tomboy when you were younger.
Madhur Jaffrey:
I was quite the tomboy, yes. I played cricket with the boys because all my cousins my age were boys. I had no choice. There were no girls my age at all. So I just played around with my boy cousins. I had to play cricket. I had to go fishing. And I learned all that from them because that's what they did.
Kerry Diamond:
One of my favorite stories was how you learned to swim. Can you tell everyone? Because it involves some fruit.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes. So what happened was that we used to go into the river, which was just behind our house, and we used to fish. And then when it was summer, across the river, on the other side, on the other bank, they would grow watermelons. And what we would do is go to the other side and then we would get them watermelons. And then we'd roll them down to the river and then float on them and just swim, paddle, swim with the watermelons, and come to the other side. And a lot of us learned to swim using the watermelon as a float, and you keep swimming and the watermelon is under you. And then you take it home. It's heavy to carry. And then you eat it. So nothing is wasted.
Kerry Diamond:
It was interesting when you wrote about learning how to swim with the watermelon, and you brought the watermelon home, you mentioned that you ate the fruit inside. And then I forget who it was, but they pickled the rind and saved the seeds.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes, they pickled the rind. So every bit of it was used. We had pickled rinds. That was a typical dish to have in the summer because you had a lot of rind leftover and the rinds were delicious. It was a water pickle. So basically, what it had in it was mustard seeds that were crushed and water. And when you put that together, the mustard seeds turn sour after a while. So it was like a gherkin pickle. Like that. It was sour with the watermelon rind that had now become soft enough to eat.
Kerry Diamond:
Madhur, another part that I found so evocative and amazing were the picnics that your family would go on because you've already established that you had this huge family. Now, there were about 30 of you and you would all pile into two cars. And the process of piling everyone into the cars was so elaborate and funny. And the food. And the food, right. Can you walk us through first, the getting into the car process, and then what you would eat during the picnics?
Madhur Jaffrey:
Okay. So here is what happened. First of all, the food is being made in the kitchen for days, several days. And it's being prepared as sort of a whole lot of stuff. Usually, it's meatballs, which we all loved, and there would be some kind of potatoes that we ate with puris, which are fried little breads. They're little breads of this size, and you throw them in hot oil and you hit them lightly with a spatula 'til they puff up. And then you take them out and put them on paper towels or something, and they drain, and you deflate them, and you pack them in a container and you take them. So this is what you're going to eat everything with. And then all this is packed, the hundreds of different carriers and this and that, and braziers to heat the food.
Madhur Jaffrey:
And it's all very complicated because tea has to be made, food has to be heated, so all this is being packed and gotten ready. Meanwhile, all of us are getting into the car. So there was a system. So there were a lot of really heavy, short people in the family, which were the women. They were sort of rounded, generally, quite rounded, and they would be quite short and they would sit in the first layer. Now, in between the ladies would slip in two younger people, maybe 17, 18, 19, slip in between them. Then there was another layer on top of youngsters that sat on the top of all of this kind of seating. And then in front would be the sort of tall men and the big different carrier, whatever he couldn't carry. So these big tall men, because the men were always tall somehow in our family and the women were always short. I don't know why.
Madhur Jaffrey:
So they sat on the front. And then the food would be piled some in our laps and some in wherever it can go in the back. And then the car would try to start and try to start again. And then it would finally start and begin to go. And there were two cars and they would go slowly one after the other. And we would go all through Delhi 'til we got to the outskirts of Delhi. And there we would have a picnic in some great historic spot. There was a tall steeple from the 12th century and we often went there, because they had lovely gardens as well. And we had our picnic. They spread out what we call the ‘dhari’ with a sheet on top of it. And then everybody sat on the ‘dhari’ and all around. And we were given plates or some sort of plates made out of leaves very often. And we put the food on those and we ate. We ate all the food that was heated and prepared for us.
Kerry Diamond:
Can you tell us a few other things? You mentioned the meatballs, what else?
Madhur Jaffrey:
Well, there was a special kind of potatoes that we ate with puris that you boil the potatoes and then you break them up with your hands so that they're uneven shapes. And then you put cumin, asafetida, a little tomato, and turmeric, and you saute all this. Then you put the broken tomatoes in and a little water. And that was it. It was so delicious. So delicious with the poori, with the breads. And so were the meatballs, which we all loved with the puris. So this was something on that line. And then after this, there would be tea. Tea would be made. And the tea would be the kind of tea that is made with the milk. And it could have masala in it as well or not, and it could have sugar in it or not. And then we had that in earthen kind of terracotta cups. So they tasted of the terracotta and the tea, the lovely tea, as we drank them. They were wonderful.
Kerry Diamond:
So beautiful. I'd love to talk about chaat for a moment. You talk about, if I'm pronouncing this correctly, the Konji Chaatwala, who would come through with chaat. Can you tell us who that person was?
Madhur Jaffrey:
It's a category of food that you find on the street and they're balls of dough made out of lentils. It's hard to describe what they are. It's very light. If you're good at it, you make them be light and fluffy. And then you put yogurt on them. And the yogurt has a little sauce. The sauce can be both green and sour, made with cilantro and mint, and it can be tamarind and sugar. So the two often go together and are both together on top. So this is one chaat. There are a hundred chaats. Or you can just take potatoes. The simplest chaat is just potatoes. And you cut the boiled potatoes, you cut them up, you put salt, pepper, different kinds of red chilies, yellow chilies, green chilies on it, lemon juice. And you mix it all up. You stick a toothpick in and then you eat it and it's delicious.
Madhur Jaffrey:
You can do it with fruit. You can do it with peaches, the same thing, and you put it together. And there's another kind of chaat where you make a little ball, which is hollow, out of flour. It has to be very hard when you roll it out, the little balls. And it's made of semolina. And then you throw it in the oil and it puffs up and it's hollow inside. So you poke a hole in it and you dip it into a water, which is spicy and full of cumin. It's cumin water, but it has chilies in it, and other spices, and you dip it in it and then you try and get it into your mouth whole so it doesn't break. So these are all forms of chaat. So what my uncle used to do was order all of them and the one man who could put it all together and bring it to the house where there were 30 people, hungry mouths sort of waiting to eat it.
Madhur Jaffrey:
And he was called the home Chaatwala. And he could put it all together. And that was, for us in India, like saying, "I'm bringing the whole candy store to your house. You can have anything you want." And the sundaes are there also, the ice creams are there also, anything a child may wish for is the home Chaatwala's domain. So you've got this home Chaatwala, who was like the greatest candy store ever, and he was at your house and anyone could order anything. So that was a great treat for us. And they did things in those days like that, big gestures of bringing this whole thing to your house and you had him for the whole afternoon and you were in just heaven, absolute heaven.
Kerry Diamond:
That sounds amazing. Like the ice cream truck backs up to your house.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes, exactly. But there's more than that. Then you have the ice cream, it's not only ice cream, but ice cream sundae, every kind of candy you ever thought of is there too.
Kerry Diamond:
So, sweet and savory. That sounds like an absolute dream. Madhur, we mentioned that you have some family recipes in this book, and you referenced earlier that you didn't even know your grandmother was a vegetarian because the dinner table was so big. You included one of her recipes for a cheese cauliflower. Do you still make that dish?
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes, I do. I do. I love it. I love the cheese with the white sauce. It used to have Kraft cheese from a tin in my grandmother's time. And we loved it. We thought it was the cat's whiskers. But now, of course, I do it with other cheeses. I do it with Parmesan. I do it with all the cheese. But I still make it. And I still love cauliflower in a white sauce with cheese. I still love it.
Kerry Diamond:
What are some of the spices that are in that dish?
Madhur Jaffrey:
You can put any spices you want. And one of them is cumin. And I put a whole lot of other spices. I put a little bit of fenugreek in as well. I put turmeric so it's sort of yellow. It gets a little yellow in color with the turmeric. I put coriander. I put lots of coriander. Sometimes you can brown the coriander.
Kerry Diamond:
For folks who maybe don't own any of your cookbooks yet, they have a wide variety to choose from. What would be the first book you recommend they start with?
Madhur Jaffrey:
I don't know. I think they should start with my first book, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, because it's very true to itself. It is a limited amount of food, which is the food of Delhi, which is all I knew at that time when I started writing cookbooks. I didn't know much more. I knew the food of Delhi and the people who had married into my family, so I knew a little bit of Bengali food, a little bit of Punjabi food. But basically, I knew the food of Delhi and my family's food. So you start with a small area of India and then you can expand.
Kerry Diamond:
And if we were to do a group cooking activity and cook one of your recipes, what would you suggest?
Madhur Jaffrey:
Oh, boy. Now that, you could have told me because I would have had to think and look up my books because I never remember what I've cooked. An eggplant dish. It's in my English first book, Indian Cookery. And I think it's just called eggplant in the pickling style. Eggplant in the pickling style. Yeah, that's the one.
Kerry Diamond:
Can you walk us through that?
Madhur Jaffrey:
The main spices that you use in pickles are fennel seeds, cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds, fenugreek seeds, kalonji. Kalonji is nigella. Nigella. N-I-G-E-L-L-A. So those are the main pickling spices. So what you do is that you fry the eggplant with onions in this mixture, and you put as many chilies as you want. And you brown it lightly and you cook it 'til it’s sort of not hard and until it's softened completely. And that's basically what it is. And you can add tomatoes, you can even add tomatoes, but the eggplant should be cooked down to a softness in this, sauteed slowly in this, until it's soft and edible.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you so much to Madhur Jaffrey for joining us. If you don't own one of Madhur's books, maybe do what she suggests and start at the very beginning. And be sure to pick up her memoir, Climbing the Mango Trees. It's a beautiful read, and you will absolutely get lost in the pages. Thank you to Sitka Salmon Shares for supporting this episode. You can check them out at sitkasalmonshares.com. Radio Cherry Bombe is produced by Cherry Bombe Media. This episode was engineered and edited by Jenna Sadhu. Thanks for listening, everybody. You are the bombe.
Harry from When Harry Met Sally:
I'll have what she's having.