Madhur Jaffrey, a life through food
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 976 Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2013
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sheila Dillon meets Madhur Jaffrey, Indian cooking legend, who's just returned from the sub-continent on her latest adventures into its vast food culture.
This year the actress, broadcaster and food writer turns eighty. She left Delhi sixty years ago to pursue a career in the west, but still remains the world's most influential and respected exponents of Indian cuisine.
With her BBC television series and more than fifteen books she's managed to convey the rich history and flavours of authentic Indian regional cooking. Now, as India becomes one of the most important economies in the world, and a nation increasingly interested in western tastes and modern brands, Sheila meets Madhur to reflect on her early food life in Delhi and to ask her about a rapidly changing India.
This is a life story of exquisite family meals in the 1930's that mixed British and Indian traditions, of school lunches where food would be shared between friends from very different food backgrounds and where watching a mushroom dish, "devoured by greedy men" was one of the images that led her to leave India.
The programme also includes a fascinating encounter between Madhur and a British food tradition, chips with curry sauce.
Producer: Dan Saladino.
Transcript
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| 0:40.0 | Jeffrey. I'm going to make Rurun Josh today. This is a classical North Indian dish. |
| 0:57.0 | And this is the voice, the woman who became our guide. |
| 1:01.0 | And it's cooked in a rich red sauce. |
| 1:04.6 | In fact in India they say that if a cook can make |
| 1:07.4 | Ruhan Josh well then he can make anything well. |
| 1:10.0 | It's a mark of a great chef. |
| 1:12.1 | In 1982 via the BBC's education department, Madder Jaffrey arrived |
| 1:17.4 | on our television screens. Britain and India had a rich relationship for centuries, even before the subcontinent became part of the |
| 1:26.1 | empire, we were fascinated by India and its food. |
| 1:30.4 | From the 1920s Indian restaurants of a sort attracted crowds. |
| 1:35.0 | But here was someone to show us Indian food as it was eaten in the different regions of the vast continent, not watered down for the British palate. |
| 1:46.0 | I'm going to put in some brown spices and I have here a teaspoon of... A beautiful woman from Delhi who'd broken with the traditions of her class and |
| 1:58.0 | culture to come to London to study drama, worked and continued to work as an actress in London and New York, but who also |
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