This Asian Pacific American Heritage Month we bring you an icon of the community.

Mother Joffrey first made Indian cuisine accessible to the West decades ago with her milestone cookbook, an invitation to Indian cooking.

2024 marks 50 years since that book made Mother a household name,

selling millions of copies and launching her into the culinary stratosphere.

She spoke to us recently from her home in New York for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

I'm Mathura Joffrey.

In the crowded cosmopolitan world of cuisine, she has single name status.

Mader Joffrey. Mader Joffrey.

Mader Joffrey.

But for famed Indian chef Madder Jaffrey, the path to numerous best-selling cookbooks,

multiple James Beard Awards, and the highest civilian honors in both India and the United Kingdom wasn't planned.

I think of it as a huge wonderful accident and it

for serendipity I don't know what you want to call it, but it just happened.

And I've enjoyed myself hugely while it happened.

Ironically, growing up in North India, Madder Joffrey didn't spend much time in the kitchen.

I did everything the boys did.

I played with them, I played cricket, I went fishing, I went swimming in the river behind our house.

An aspiring actress she left home in Delhi for London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1958 at the age of 19.

Far from home, what she missed most was her mother's cooking.

We used to go up five floors of steps to the canteen, and then we would get this, you know, gray slice of rose-leaf that you could hardly look at.

And I would think, oh my God, the food at home is so good, why am I eating this? So what I did was rather than just give up and eat that rubbishy food I wrote

to my mother and I said look I don't know how to cook but can you teach me can you send me

...