‘I was cast as the exotic girl – then as the terrorist’s mother’: Madhur Jaffrey on acting, food and race
First she was a movie star, then she taught the west to love Indian cookery. At 85, she looks back on two remarkable careers
Winter is emptying the last of its sleet from the sky as Madhur Jaffrey opens the door to her home in upstate New York. The house, built in the 1790s, smells of ancient wood. Jaffrey and her husband, the violinist Sanford Allen, spend a few days a week here, driving up from the Greenwich Village apartment where they have lived for 52 years. At 5ft 2in, with her hair in a shiny bob, Jaffrey cuts an unfussily elegant figure.
We are here to talk about her newest venture, Madhur Jaffrey’s Instantly Indian Cookbook. A compendium of recipes for the Instant Pot, an electric pressure cooker that has won itself an army of devotees known as “potheads”, it is her 30th cookbook. What makes this particularly impressive is that, for Jaffrey, writing about food has always been a second career.