Cookbook of the Week: An Invitation to Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey

My journey to cooking began in New York City, where I was born to parents who were young and lacked financial means, but had grown up in major metropolitan areas, and enjoyed cuisine from all over the world.

Any remaining memories from the time before we moved to rural Vermont, when I was almost six, consist of things I ate in New York. Specifically, I recall wolfing down potato knish on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, savoring lox and cream cheese on bagels, and sampling a variety of dim sum in Chinatown. I can also remember the smell of anise biscotti that had just finished baking, and watching a cashier wrap crisply folded boxes containing cookies and pastries with red and white striped string.

After we moved to Danville, Vermont, which then had a population of 1,705 (or maybe we made it, 1,708?), those foods I loved disappeared from my world. In their place, I discovered New England specialties including maple baked beans, cottage pie, no-bake cookies, and sugar-on-snow.

Although I came to love these hearty dishes, I still longed for the kind of food we had in the city. And at some point, around the age of eight or nine, I started paging through my mom’s cookbooks. The first one I perused: Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking, published in 1973.

Since my mom passed away in 2020, I now own that original copy. The cover is stained and missing a corner, and the pages are brittle and browned. Although there are some charming floral illustrations throughout, there aren’t any pictures of the food. However, I find the book stunning. Given when it was published, and the state of American cuisine at the time, it’s delightful to find that the book calls for asafetida, cilantro (referred to as Chinese parsley!), fresh ginger, and whole cardamom pods.

In my tiny Vermont town, I wasn’t likely to find all of these ingredients, but I read hungrily nonetheless. When I was old enough to cook sans supervision, Jaffrey’s potato samosas were one of the dishes I learned how to make. The recipes are adapted for Americans, but are nevertheless complex in flavor, and ask the reader to do the work of learning about potentially unfamiliar foods and sourcing them, and trying new techniques.

Today, as I opened the book, trying not to knock pages loose from the spine, I found a bookmark that I hadn’t placed next to a recipe for beef or lamb kheema with fried onions. Beside it are small notations in my mom’s handwriting, indicating that she liked to use half of the amount of cumin and coriander called for. I may not agree, but I’m glad I found it.