Padma Lakshmi and Madhur Jaffrey jubilee 2019 Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond. I cannot believe it's September and I'm guessing some of you feel the same. If you're a new listener, welcome. Radio Cherry Bombe features interviews with the coolest culinary personalities around. And me, I'm the founder of Cherry Bombe and editor of our print magazine.
Today, we're dipping into the Jubilee archives. Jubilee is a conference we launched in 2014, and it's become the biggest gathering of women in the world of food and drink in the U.S. It's always a memorable day with lots of incredible women connecting and sharing their wisdom. Today, we're going to hear from some of them recorded live on the Jubilee stage. First up is Michelle and Suzanne Rousseau, sisters from Jamaica who are cookbook authors, chefs, and restaurateurs. They tell us a bit about their story and introduce Padma Lakshmi and Madhur Jaffrey.
Padma, of course, is the force behind the Hulu show, Taste the Nation. She's a star of Top Chef and a best-selling author. Madhur Jaffrey is the trailblazing actor, author, and teacher who has introduced countless people to the cuisines of India. Madhur is a legend and we are very lucky to have her join us.
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Back to Jubilee for a sec, we announced our 2023 date. Jubilee is taking place Saturday, April 15th, at Center415 in Manhattan, and you can snag an early bird ticket right now. Visit cherrybombe.com for more details. It will be our 10th in-person Jubilee. I cannot believe it. Tickets sell out every single year, so don't delay. I would love to see you there. Now, let's welcome the Rousseau sisters recorded live at Jubilee 2019 in Brooklyn, New York.
Michelle Rousseau:
Good afternoon, everyone.
Suzanne Rousseau:
Good afternoon everybody.
Michelle Rousseau:
In June 1977, at the ages of five and seven respectively, we moved from Kingston, Jamaica to Port of Spain, Trinidad. Trinidad was vastly different to Jamaica yet still very familiar. Up until that point, our life had been a series of birthday parties with donkey cart rides, bone-eating contests, tasty beef patties, Ribena, D&G Kola Champagne, Milo with loads of condensed milk, along with warm grandmotherly hugs and an overabundance of friends, family, and loved ones.
Suzanne Rousseau:
Moving to Trinidad was dramatic for us. We were isolated, friendless with little contact to home and our family as we had no phone for the four years we lived there. We were insiders and outsiders at the same time. Our family's move triggered the explorer in us. We became each other's companion and abandoned ourselves to a fantasy life that we believed real. One that involved exploring gardens, seeking adventures, searching for fairies and magic, reading and storytelling and a whole baby of new foods to embrace.
It is there that we became exposed to an entire new cuisine whose roots hail from African, Indian, Spanish, French, and Portuguese inhabitants. In Trinidad, we encountered ingredients and flavors in Caribbean food that were revelatory. And we began to understand the juxtaposition of the refined with the rustic that is so typical of the islands. This dynamic and exciting new culinary discovery awaken our palate to that particular salt, sweet, spice balance that is unique to Caribbean food.
Michelle Rousseau:
Our daily trek home from school, and any outing quite honestly, always included a variety of roadside street food episodes. An exercise in the extremes of sugar, salt, and hot pepper, to be sure. Salt prune dust on the square of brown paper. Tamarind balls that were simultaneously tart, spicy, salty, and sweet. Channa, which is a crispy snack of fried chickpeas seasoned with culantro, hot pepper, and lots of salt. Pepper mango, pepper cherries, and pickle pumpsity sold in plastic bags at all the local spots and roadside doubles. Curry chickpeas on a fried flatbread. Shark and bake, a beach-side, incredible fried fish sandwich. And snow cones around the Savanna smothered with fruit syrup and the addition, again, of condensed milk. These foods were fantastic discoveries to our palates and the layers of flavor were mind blowing, so we gobbled them all up.
Suzanne Rousseau:
While eating these foods on the street, our mother regularly prepared classic Jamaican dishes. like oxtail and broad beans, Escovitch fish and ackee, and saltfish at home. She could also prepare Peking duck from scratch and regularly made homemade yogurt, rum raisin ice cream, donuts, and beef stroganoff. Our favorite Sunday suppers were built around the British classics, like roast lamb with potatoes and mint sauce or roast beef with Yorkshire puddings. Mommy's repertoire also included regional dishes from our new Caribbean home, like Pilau, a one-pot dish of chicken, rice, and pigeon peas. And Guyanese pepper pot, a rich meat stew seasoned with cassava syrup. She was the consummate home cook and hostess, and through her, we began to understand the connection to cooking as a way to show love, forge a sense of belonging, welcome strangers, create memory, and celebrate heritage.
Michelle Rousseau:
When we first started in food 25 years ago, our desire was to replicate the experience of living, dining, and growing up in the Caribbean. Where food at its essence is a mix of home-cooked meals and street food that varies from island to island, home to home, and from street to street. As we sought our voice as restaurateurs, we had an innate knowing that these childhood memories and the contradictions of our upbringing, along with the unique blend of flavors, cultures, and cuisines that we had been exposed to were the fuel we needed to feed the growing fire of our culinary identity.
We sought guidance in the books of women who we felt mirrored this elevated home cooking. Silver Palate, Barefoot Contessa, and Martha Stewart to name a few. Yet, these were all external references and not necessarily relatable to a Caribbean lifestyle. Alongside these classics always sat the works of Madhur Jaffrey. It is our honor and privilege to introduce two incredible women who most certainly understand the contradictory experience of growing up in an ethnically diverse country that was once under British colonial rule. Where the expectation is that one must be simultaneously British, but not too much, speak proper English, to extend your “A’s” and pronounce your “T’s”, yet retain your knowledge, love, and respect for your own culture.
Suzanne Rousseau:
Two women who, like us, left that culture and made new homes in a new place. Two women who, despite not coming from traditional culinary backgrounds, are respected epicureans, pioneers, and leaders in the world of gastronomy. Two women who, each in her own way, has managed to carve out a space in the world of culinary storytelling that is uniquely her own. Our immediate thought when we first saw Padma Lakshmi, was on screen, that is of course on Top Chef, is who is that feminine, graceful, elegant. She reminded us of the women we were surrounded by growing up. She presented us with a new visage in the world of food TV. This was no sweaty, cursing, white alpha male in a chef jacket. She was poised, chic, stylish, and she looked like the woman that we knew.
Michelle Rousseau:
How can we begin to explain the impact that Madhur Jaffrey's prolific body of work has had on us. Many times in our career, even as we set out to write our first cookbook, we thought to ourselves, if only we could be the Madhur Jaffrey of Caribbean food. We were never interested in being known as the best restaurateurs or chefs, but as wisdom keepers, storytellers, guardians of our culture. Madhur, a woman who was educated, cultured, dignified, and refined, but accessible, was a model we wanted to emulate.
Suzanne Rousseau:
All great storytelling has the capacity to trigger nostalgic memory in the reader and listener. Padma describing her favorite papri chaat, crunchy fried semolina dressed with the holy trinity of cool tart yogurt, bright cilantro mint chutney, and tangy tamarind date chutney, reminds us of our favorite street side Trinidadian snacks. Pholourie balls, akra and saheena, basically different forms of fritters made with split peas, salted cod, and callaloo. Dressed gloriously with an array of typical Trini sauces, tamarind, Chadon Beni, curried mango, and hot pepper.
Michelle Rousseau:
And Madhur's description of her young self climbing and foraging mango trees with her eldest siblings and dipping the spoils of their labor in a mixture of salt, pepper, chili, and cumin while the adults, of course, took afternoon naps, triggers memories of our own lazy childhood summer days, which also included the requisite tree climbing and perpetual search for the perfect, not quite ripe mango to make mango chow. A pickle made with green or turned mangoes cut into thin slivers and marinated with salt, pepper, vinegar, and hot spices, which we devour out of a big bowl, barefoot and happy in the backyard.
Suzanne Rousseau:
Food has the power to unite us through a web of shared remembrances, experiences, and flavors. By sharing our food stories, we share culture, we encourage diversity, we teach about heritage and community, and we celebrate the legion of female ancestors and wise women who have cooked and cared for so many for so long. It is with profound pleasure that we present Padma Lakshmi and Madhur Jaffrey.
Michelle and Suzanne Rousseau:
Padma Lakshmi and Madhur Jaffrey.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Thank you so much.That was a lovely... In fact, I want a copy of that. Thank you and I miss callaloo so much.
Padma Lakshmi:
Oh shit, we have a hard act to follow. Okay, so I'm sure that everyone in this room knows Madhur and who she is, I'm going to... No? Okay, yes. Is there anyone who doesn't know? Okay. Madhur Jaffrey is the greatest living writer on Indian food ever, okay?
Padma Lakshmi:
One, she's also the only Indian woman to win a best actress award and a Silver Bear—it's called at the Berlin Film Festival. No one has done that. Not only, not at Berlin, not at Cannes, and not at Venice, before her or after her. Two, Madhur was one of the first Brown women that any of us, whether we were Indian or Trini or Filipino, saw on the cover of a major book in major bookstores, not only in America but also in England. She is also the first Brown person we saw talking about our food on British television during the golden age of BBC programming in the 80's. She has a lot of other stuff, we're going to get to it now, but that gives you the haiku version.
I'm going to start really far back, and I want to move quickly because I want to get to all of your lives. You've had an extraordinary life. I want to know a little bit about the family that you were born into, and I remember reading in your memoir that you ate with 30 or 40 relatives in a joint-family, like most Indians in the last several decades, in a big house outside of Delhi, right? And you ate most meals with 30 to 40 people constantly. And that all the wo... this I know as well… that all the women in that family would jostle to try to get the best tidbits from the table for their children. This is a big joint family with many siblings and sister-in-laws and everything. So I want to know how that fact… I want to hear about your family but first I want to hear about how that fact shaped you in how you grew, or if it did at all?
Madhur Jaffrey:
We lived in this huge family. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and there was a hard aspect to it and there was a wonderful aspect to it. The harder aspect I think was for my parents' generation because they had to deal with each other, they had to keep their little family, their nuclear family intact, and somehow part of the bigger family. But for us cousins growing up, we were so many of us little ones and many of them in the same age group. So I was in the same age group as all boys. There were no girls my age. They were my sister's generation, my brother's generation, but not in mine. I had a very different life from those people. I learned how to play cricket. I learned how to fish. I did all the things that a boy does and wondered why I was a girl.
And I never knew, I never understood that girls are different. I thought I was the same as my cousins. I did the same things, I was as good at the same things. And then I began to learn that it's not the same. That boys are like, “Oh, he's going to inherit his father's property.” And so the servants even would talk to the boys differently and talk to the girls as, “They're going to go away to some other household so the boy is the one to be worshiped and treated well because he's going to be in the house forever.” I began to sense that difference, began to resent that difference. And I think that aspect of the Indian family life stayed with me. And then I also saw all these inner fightings going on, especially in my mother's generation where each mother would try and keep the best thing for her children, and some were very good and generous and didn't do that, and some did.
And so you saw how possessive and selfish people can be, but I was learning, having a lifetime's experience of living in that kind of world. It was a whole world, but I was having it with just these 30 or 40 people that I saw constantly. So I came up with a desire to break through, not worry that men were men and would get more. I saw it happening and I said, “It's not going to happen to me or I'm going to get out of here.” And I did get out of here. So that was one of the things that prompted me out of India, was this seeing every day that a woman's position is not the same as a man's position and it did have a very important effect on my life.
Padma Lakshmi:
In your early childhood, you were living basically in Delhi, outside of Delhi…
Madhur Jaffrey:
In Delhi.
Padma Lakshmi:
In Delhi proper.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah.
Padma Lakshmi:
In Gandhi Ji’s India. What was that like? Because you were 14 by the time he was killed. So…
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah. Right.
Padma Lakshmi:
You remember where you were when you heard…
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Padma Lakshmi:
Gandhi was killed?
Madhur Jaffrey:
What happened was that my father belonged to the Congress Party, which is a party that was fighting for independence against the British. And we would do things like when we went to a movie, the British National Anthem was played and we would all stand up. And my father, my mother, their six children would all walk out. This was what my father's doing. He just taught us to walk out when the “God Save The King”.. “God Save The Queen”... played. So, we did that. It was our own form of protests against the British Raj. And then I also learned because Gandhi Ji was teaching all of us, don't buy British fabrics, don't buy British anything, weave your own cloth, weave, make your own thread, weave your own cloth. So I learned how to weave. I've got a little spinning wheel. I think I was 10 years old at that time and followed Gandhi's instructions and I wove thread which was sent then to be made into cloth. And we were all trying to wear swadeshi, homemade stuff... food. Oh, food always comes to my head.
So anyway, so we grew up in that period and one day my mother said to me, “I would to hear Gandhi Ji speak.” And he used to have these prayer meetings up on a little hill and everybody sat below and listened to him. And we went, my mother and I; I said, “I want to come with you.” I went with her to listen. There were millions of people. It took hours to get there. There was dust, there was chaos, cars trying to get in. Anyway, we got in just in time. We heard him and we came back and just a few days later, within the week we were listening to Gandhi because it was also broadcast on the radio. We were listening to Gandhi Ji speak and we heard he'd been killed. And it was everyone was listening on the radio, everyone, all the people around us, all our neighbors were on the radio. It's like when Kennedy died…
Padma Lakshmi:
Because there's only one channel also.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes.
Padma Lakshmi:
It's not like here where you have so many…
Madhur Jaffrey:
So everybody came out into the street and said, “Oh my God, what is going to happen?” And we thought it was a Muslim that had killed a Hindu. But it turned out, it was a very right wing Hindu that had killed Gandhi because he would tried to say, we are all one, let us all live together. Well, that was not good enough for this very virtuous right wing Hindu; he shot him to death. So I remember that awful feeling of running out into the street, everybody looking at each other and saying, his last words were, “Hiram, oh God.” And we were all saying, “Hiram, oh God. What has happened?” So, I think there were things we shared as Indians and one of them was British get out. That was one of the things. And the other was, this is our India. And Gandhi was the great leader for us who was shot and that was really hard.
Padma Lakshmi:
You talked about getting out of India and you went to the UK, you had a scholarship at RADA.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah.
Padma Lakshmi:
At Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. That, can you talk about that experience? Had you been abroad before?
Madhur Jaffrey:
No, I was about 20 years old, 19 or 20. I'd done my BA in English because I had wanted to go to art school. I thought I used to paint as a kid and I wanted to go to art school but my family, particularly my eldest sister whom I listened to a lot, said, why would you want to go to art school? You can always do art afterwards but go get a degree and get a degree in English. You can…
Padma Lakshmi:
And philosophy, right?
Madhur Jaffrey:
In English.
Padma Lakshmi:
Only English?
Madhur Jaffrey:
English with history and philosophy as minors. And then you'll be able to read and write and at least you'll have that behind you and then go to school afterwards. But of course, I went and did my English honors and I started acting in the amateur theater in Delhi at that time. So then I was full of the theater and that's all I wanted to do. And I applied for a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and I got it, then went to drama school. And that was, my father just took and put me on a boat and said, “Okay, go.”
I think the interesting thing was that my father had six children. He had two perfect boys, two perfect, good looking girls, and then me, who was a sort of... He didn't know what I was and I didn't know what I was. I was ambitious, I wanted things, I got angry. I was unlike any of the others. And so I became my father's wonderful experiment. She can be what she wants to be. And then my youngest sister was my youngest sister but I was allowed freedom. Whenever my mother said, for example, I love to suck bones. I still do. So I would sit, I'd be in the dining room and I'd be eating a bone and then everyone would've finished and I would take my bone out into the next room. And my mother would say, “No, you can't suck a bone.” And my father would say, “Let her be. She wants to suck the bone cheek. She must need something in it.”
I became his glorious little experiment of a free child who was really allowed to do what she wanted and I thrived. I thrived under that situation. So he said, when I said I wanted to go to RADA, he said, “Okay, fine. You go.” And he took me, put me on a boat, a P&O liner that was going to Southampton alone. I was alone and I was fine. I was ready for the world. I was ready to face the future. Anything that came, I was totally ripe for it. And on the boat, it's funny what foods you think are exotic when India was fighting with the British against the Germans and the Japanese; we all had to do what the British wanted. And the British army, once the war was over, let loose these things called K-rations, which came in little boxes wrapped in brownish wax paper. They had so many of them fighting the war in Burma and things that… they just released them for one Rupee each or something into the streets of India. And we would get them and open them Christmas bags and inside it with cigarettes.
There was fruit cocktail with cherries. There was tinned pineapple, forget the good pineapple we could get, this was tinned and it was really different. There were olives which I'd never had before. There was SPAM, wonderful SPAM that came in little tins that you opened up. So this became the exotic food for us and it was so amazing. So wonderful. We thought this was the greatest. So we grew up at this time where the British were just leaving and I left during that period and went to drama school in England. And England was at that time, this is we are talking about 1956-57, something like that. There was smog. There was literally pea-green smog in England at that time. And it was just after the war and the food was terrible. RADA had a cafeteria on the fifth floor. So you would climb up the stairs and go up and then you would get this see-through slice of gray roast beef, mashed potatoes that had been cooked for days, cabbage that was all...
Padma Lakshmi:
Sad?
Madhur Jaffrey:
Sad from having been cooked and cooked and cooked. And I would dream of Indian food and the food my mother had in our house. And that's when I started writing letters to my mother and saying, please teach me how to cook. Teach me how to cook cauliflower potatoes, teach me how to cook meats with whole spices. Teach me how to cook daal, teach me how to cook rice, teach me how to make tea. I didn't know anything. So she started writing me little air letters and that's…
Padma Lakshmi:
Aerograms.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Aerograms. Exactly.
Padma Lakshmi:
I remember you folded them in three…
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes.
Padma Lakshmi
:With this baby blue paper.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Exactly. Baby blue paper.
Padma Lakshmi:
But she only gave you ingredients, right?
Madhur Jaffrey:
No, she just said... There were three lines and in Hindi, take a little bit of this, little bit of that. “Bhuno” or brown is a little and then put some water and let it cook.
Padma Lakshmi:
But that's a good... If you had to boil it down, that's a great…
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes. That's what it was…
Padma Lakshmi:
Short recipe for anything Indian…
Madhur Jaffrey:
Right.
Padma Lakshmi:
Yeah.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah. But the one thing I write about in my memoir and it's something that I didn't discover till I was writing the memoir, which is around 2000…
Padma Lakshmi:
And six.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Six, it came out. But I…
Padma Lakshmi:
I'm channeling my best James Lifton right now.
Madhur Jaffrey:
It was then when I was writing it that I began to realize that the senses are very important. We are not all born with all good senses, developed senses. Some people, like my husband, they have a very good ear, but what does it mean? It means you hear well but you retain it and you remember it and you can compare and contrast and do all these things in your head because you are hearing it so well. So obviously I was born with a good eye but I was also born with a good palate and I didn't know this. So everything I had eaten, I remember the taste. It had gone up to my head and was like files in the brain.
And I could recall and even to this day when I shop and I look at green beans, if they look good, I say, now shall I make them with mustard seeds and this and this? And I taste it in my mouth. I said, “No, I don't think I feel that today.” Then I try another set of ingredients and I taste that and I said, “No, not that.” Oh, I think I'll do it with ginger and garlic and then I'm tasting it. A lot of people have good palates and they can taste but it is one of the senses that is crucial to remembering and retaining and recalling and being able to recreate.
Padma Lakshmi:
And then just 10 years after that, you won the Silver Bear for Shakespeare Wallah.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah.
Padma Lakshmi:
Okay. So I have a specific question about that. We talked about you being the only one and I just want to know, it's often in my own career I have felt the odd duck just because I didn't see people around me who had similar backgrounds or stories or look like me. Not that you need that to be with somebody or be inspired by somebody but I just want to know, that's happened to me recently, 10 years ago even. What was that like in 1965? Can you just describe being in Berlin? I saw a beautiful, fabulous, glamorous picture of you with Edie Sedgwick.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes.
Padma Lakshmi:
At the New York Film Festival, which was divine. But what was that in Berlin? It must have been surreal…
Madhur Jaffrey:
But it was so unexpected. Nobody expected me to win, least of all me. And if anybody was going to win, it was going to be Felicity Kendal, who's a British actress who had the lead part in the film. And everyone was disappointed that I won, except me.
Padma Lakshmi:
I'm not disappointed. I'm glad you won, all these things…
Madhur Jaffrey:
And I had to hide it because everyone was angry at me that I had won. And I remember James Ivory coming up to me and saying,”You go and talk to Felicity, say something to her, apologize to her.” I said, “Okay.” But I just felt so alone and out of it because I hadn't planned this. I'd just done my role and got out. But it just, I don't know. It was an awkward time and I've had many such awkward times when I'm an unexpected, unprepared winner of something. And it's happened quite by accident and quite by chance. And I don't know what to do, and I'm left apologizing.
Padma Lakshmi:
And so we're going to talk about your food a little bit because it's Cherry Bombe and we only have a few minutes left.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes, we should.
Padma Lakshmi:
But I wanted to ask you, when did you, I know that through the movie, it smells sort of introduce you to The New York Times and to Craig Claiborne because he was just trying to get press. If you don't know who Ismail Merchant is, Ismail is a very strange and wonderful character who made a bunch of films, including Howards End with his partner, James Ivory. I wanted to ask you about your complicated relationship with him because a lot of collaborators have had very complicated relationships with them.
Madhur Jaffrey:So Ismail Merchant and James Ivory were a duo. Actually I introduced them to each other. When we were all very young, Ismail was still at NYU [New York University] doing business and Jim was a young filmmaker who had come from the west coast to New York and I knew him first and I knew Ismail first. Then we all started talking about Ismail was very ambitious. He had great dreams. He wanted to do films and he wanted to do theater. He wanted to do everything and he wanted to be the king of entertainment in America. And of course, he would drag in anyone who was at all involved in the arts into it. And of course, I certainly got pulled very much into it. And he had a way he could... He had a salesman's talent. He could sell his little finger to you. He could sell his grandmother to you.
He had that enormous ability. So he would persuade. He was such a character. He would persuade people like you. He would suddenly come to you and say, “I'm making a film in India and I can't do it without you. And you must come, oh, you must come to India with me. And we are going next month.” So you would rent your house. You would say, “Okay, we are going.” And know when the month was over, the time was came, knew he wasn't ready to go. And you would say, “Oh, what should I do with my house? Oh, nevermind, never. We'll go. Don't worry.” Six months would pass and your house would be rented and you wouldn't have a house but he had a way of not somehow doing it and getting away with it each time. So when he did another film, which you should rent and see, it's the one-hour film called Autobiography of a Princess.
And he said, “I'm going to have only two characters in this film. It's going to be you and Laurence Olivier.” I said, “Oh my God, this is going to be so wonderful. Laurence Olivier is, my God”. And then the next day, it wasn't Laurence Olivier, it was John Gielgud. It's going to be John Gielgud. I said, “Okay, that's very good.” So this would go on and on and I... He gave me the script but I wouldn't learn the lines because it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen. And one day, he said is James Mason and we are doing it next week. And I didn't know my lines. I didn't know anything and I was suddenly in England having dinner with James Mason. He knew his lines. I didn't know mine. It was really sad but I had read up on him and obviously he was absolutely wonderful. So it's just basically the two of us in this Autobiography of Princess and it's quite wonderful.
Padma Lakshmi:
Okay. So now you meet The New York Times and you meet Judith Jones.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes.
Padma Lakshmi:
Legendary Judith Jones. Tell me about your relationship with Judith. What it was to work with her as an editor and as a friend.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Well, it happened indirectly that I had met… that article by Craig Claiborne came out in The New York Times. It was a whole page. I was approached by a freelance editor who said, “We'd love to do a book.” I didn't know about editors, freelance or not. So I said, fine. I started writing a book. And then, of course, he fell apart because he was not any real thing. And the book was bought by one publisher, then they dropped it. And I asked my friend, a writer called Ved Mehta, what I should do. He said, “I have a friend called André Schiffrin and he's an editor of Pantheon Books and let me ask him what you should do.” So he said, give it to Judith Jones. And he took the book and overnight gave it to Judith Jones who, as you all know, was a fabulous editor who did not only Julia Child but a whole lot of other people.
And she bought it overnight. Didn't pay me much, because if you're with Knopf, you don't need to pay here with this big house. I got very little money as an advance but I was bought by Knopf. And Judith was a wonderful editor. I mean, I had already written most of the book but she honed it and she had very good ideas, like putting menus because people don't know what Indian food is. What would you eat with what. Give people ideas about how you should eat. And she became a lifelong friend also after that. And I was lucky. I was very lucky to have one of the best editors in America to do my first book.
Padma Lakshmi:
I heard that that book took you five years, which made me feel better because I took my... What was that, after that process to write... I mean, because you've written so many books. Madhur has seven James Beard Awards under her belt.
Madhur Jaffrey:
When Judith asked me to... The book was fairly done and she said, “How long would you take to finish the book?” And I said, “Oh, six months. I don't know. It just won't take long.” Took me five years because I had never written a book fully before. And I'm a perfectionist. Everything has to be absolutely right before I handed it in. Every “I” has to be dotted. It has to be clean, a clean copy. I will not hand in an unclean copy. So I give the book as finished to my editor. So I kept working on it. I wrote an introduction, long introduction. I wrote little introductions for all the recipes and it took me five years before I handed it in.
Padma Lakshmi:
And then after a couple of more books, you did the BBC series.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Right.
Padma Lakshmi:
In 1982. By the way, my mother has a copy of that original 1973 book. She's looking very glad, it's a blue sari, right?
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yes.
Padma Lakshmi:
Looking very glamorous, lounging with all these…
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah. And they always said, sari and lehenga.
Padma Lakshmi:
Yes.
Madhur Jaffrey:
So...
Padma Lakshmi:
Typical, like every exotic fantasy of feminine, Eastern food or whatever.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah.
Padma Lakshmi:
So what is it now when you see all of these young Indian women coming up, I mean, I can't count myself as young anymore, but all these people who are now following in your footsteps. What's that like?
Madhur Jaffrey:
They are my loves. All these young people like Priya [Krishna]. They are my loves because they are taking over. They're young, they're smart, they're more militant than I ever was. I never said I'm Brown, please look at me. They are saying that. I'm letting them do that. So there are all these young people here in America. And you know Meera Sodha?
Padma Lakshmi:
Mm-hmm.
Madhur Jaffrey:
In London. She writes for The Guardian. Now she's another one in London. So she's me. She will carry on in the best way possible. So there are all these wonderful people that I look up to and they will carry this banner forward.
Padma Lakshmi:
You've also had a lot of goofy jobs. Not goofy but interesting jobs. Did you know she was a DJ? She was a DJ. I'm not kidding. Right after college, before RADA.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah. I did work on radio. I was…
Padma Lakshmi:
All India Radio.
Madhur Jaffrey:
That's right. All India Radio. So the person who came after me was a Chinese program. It was foreign service. We were doing it for the foreign service. And so I learned how to say “This is All India Radio Delhi” in Chinese because it was always the thing just after me. That's the only Chinese I speak.
Padma Lakshmi:
I keep also waiting for Indian food to have its moment. In spite of all of us writing about it, like Thai food has or Vietnamese food has. Why do you think that it hasn't yet? Do you think that? And do you think it's on the horizon sometimes soon?
Madhur Jaffrey:
It hasn't happened?
Padma Lakshmi:
No, I don't…
Madhur Jaffrey:
I've been saying from the day I came and people have been saying to me, Indian food will have its day. It hasn't happened and I have a theory that America has relationships with foreign foods where they've had a war. They haven't had a war with India. And…
Padma Lakshmi:
Thank God.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Thank God. But therefore there's no historical connection in any way. There's no deep blood connection in any way. So Indian food has not somehow come into the heart of Americans the way Vietnamese food or Korean food has come into American society in a very basic way. Indian food has never done that. But this next generation is doing Indian-American food, including you.
Padma Lakshmi:
Yeah.
Madhur Jaffrey:
A little bit of that. And I think maybe what will come in will be this mixture.
Padma Lakshmi:
I mean, I think that's because also when we came here or our parents came here, I came here when I was four, a lot of these young women were even born here. I think when we came here, because there weren't that many of us Brown folk around, now it's growing after the... There are two waves of Indian immigration, the medical wave in the seventies and then now, the technological wave…
Madhur Jaffrey:
Right…
Padma Lakshmi:
After 2000. And over half of the Indians in this country are here after 2000. But for the ones before who were brought up here as basically Brown American kids, there weren't so many of us. There weren't any way of saying, of distinguishing the differences between different Indian ethnicities. You have to understand Indian food is so regional. That food from the south in Tamil Nadu is so different from in the north and Delhi or whatever, Gujarat and Bengal and all these places. So when you come to India, you do try to congregate and when you do, it becomes a pan-Indian diet.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Mm-hmm. Right.
Padma Lakshmi:
And then you think, well might as well throw in some American dishes that way because we're used to doing it. I mean ours also was the generation of women that worked completely full time.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah.
Padma Lakshmi:
I mean, I think you learned to cook after you left India.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Right.
Padma Lakshmi:
Because in India, your mother I'm sure had servants.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah. We had cooks. Yeah.
Padma Lakshmi:
Yeah. What do you think is the one thing that most Westerners don't understand about Indian food? Is there one thing? I mean, I'm sure there's many things.
Madhur Jaffrey:
I think they just don't understand Indian food. It's so regional, it's going to Europe.
Padma Lakshmi:
Mm-hmm.
Madhur Jaffrey:
And then you have Spanish food and you have French food and you have Italian food. And to somehow put all that under one umbrella. The only thing that we all have in common is that there are spices and these are arranged in different ways. Sometimes they're roasted. Sometimes they're not roasted. Different oils are used in different states. You prefer different oils. They're different fruit in different states. Some states have coconut, some states like where I grew up, I didn't grow up with coconut or coconut milk or anything that because we were not a coastal state. We were in right in the center. I think that understanding all that is perhaps too much to grasp in one fell swoop.
I don't know what the reason is, but I think more and more people are traveling. I was just speaking yesterday at an event where the guy who owns Russ & Daughters was also speaking. And he'd just been to India and he'd just had this experience of what India really is. And he was dumbfounded by what he had seen. So I think people have to travel to India to see what it really is. And as people travel, but people are doing more and more, they will begin to understand it. Meanwhile, something like Priya’s book, Indian-ish, I think becomes very important because she is writing for people of her generation. Who've been brought up in a certain way and they eat certain things and it's a mixture of East and West. And I think that will probably catch on before the old real thing ever comes in.
Padma Lakshmi:
Traditional region.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah.
Padma Lakshmi:
So in the very short time, we only have a couple minutes left. What is it now for you to see Sakina act? House of Cards, right?
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah.
Padma Lakshmi:
I just want to tell you also that first question, Sakina made me ask you.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Which one?
Padma Lakshmi:
The one about what it was in the family when you…
Madhur Jaffrey:
Oh.
Padma Lakshmi:
She planted that. Her daughter is Sakina, is an actress who has been in many things. What's it like now?
Madhur Jaffrey:
She's in Timeless. Last thing she was in is Timeless for those of you followed it. It makes me very happy that it's so much easier for her. It was so hard. When I came, there were no parts. There were just no parts. I could be a Middle Easterner dancing with a camel. There were parts like that. And then I played a lot of terrorist mothers. And they were just nothing. I remember going at that time, you are all too young for this, but Joseph Papp used to run the public theater and I was sent to him. They said, go talk to Joseph Papp because I had come with a lot of honors and whatever and acting. And he said, “We'll try and fit you in.” And he never fit me in. So people didn't think in terms of anyone of any color doing Shakespeare, doing any decent roles. It's changing now.
Padma Lakshmi:
It's changing, barely.
Madhur Jaffrey:
And changing barely but I see people working. I see young men working, I see young women working who have Indian-Pakistani background. And it gives me a lot of joy to see that.
Padma Lakshmi:
I once went, this is probably now a decade ago, but I once went to see a casting person at ER. You remember that show ER? And I said, “You know, if you look at any American hospital it's looking at an Indian phone book. So surely there must be a part for me somewhere here.” And he was like, “Well I think if we do well by the Blacks, we think we're doing just fine.” And I don't think he would ever wanted to say something rude. So I don't even think he realized but I didn't know what the hell to say to him. I was so shocked. Just my mouth hung open.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah.
Padma Lakshmi:
And I can't imagine how much worse it was.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Yeah. I did eventually did get to play doctors.
Padma Lakshmi:
Oh good.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Doctors, psychologists, a therapist. I played a therapist to Meryl Streep, which was great. So those then I say got into the doctor mold and that was good.
Padma Lakshmi:
Okay before we leave, I cannot let you go without saying she's got an Instapot book. So buy it. It's out soon if not already but the rap video. Can you just tell us about the rap video? Has anyone seen... Who's seen this rap video? If everybody get their phones out right now. No, I'm serious. I know you have them. Get your phones out. Google “Madhur Jaffrey rap video.” There's a New York Times piece about it that came out just very recently. So as you leave or when on your next break, just tee it up because I don't want to take more than our time and watch this thing…
Madhur Jaffrey:
It's just three-minute video.
Padma Lakshmi:
Yes, it's a three-minute video but I think you should always rock the silver long wig in the congeal of Cleopatra. She was full-on Cleopatra, gangster, eyeliner on. Anyway, on behalf of all Brown women everywhere, but just all women, Madhur, I want to tell you how much you've meant to me personally.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Thank you.
Padma Lakshmi:
And just growing up and knowing you all these years and being inspired by you and giving me just even a reinforcement of the idea that I could pursue something.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Oh yeah.
Padma Lakshmi:
Of what you've done.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Oh.
Padma Lakshmi:
I'm so honored to be here today.
Madhur Jaffrey:
Thank you so much. Thanks.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to the Rousseau sisters, Padma, and the one and only Madhur Jaffrey. All four women have authored beautiful books. So be sure to check them out. I also want to thank the incredible team of people who make Jubilee happen every year, especially our awesome volunteers. Thank you to Wild Planet for supporting today's show. If you enjoyed today's pod, check out past Radio Cherry Bombe episodes with other Jubilee speakers, including Nigella Lawson and Samin Nosrat. The links are in our show notes, and don't forget early bird tickets for Jubilee 2023 are on sale right now at cherrybombe.com while supplies last. Be in the room where all of these talks happen. Radio Cherry Bombe is a production of Cherry Bombe magazine. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Thanks to our assistant producer, Jenna Sadhu and thanks to you for listening. You are the Bombe.