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.
