The culinary legend and actress sits down with Robert Bound to discuss her cookbooks, which span the flavours of India, and how she unintentionally became a household name for anyone with a taste for South Asian cuisine. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I think of myself as an actress and I know how to present things.
I know how to hold the audience, I know how to make it colorful and give the food a chance to be known for what it is by my acting techniques that I can use when I'm presenting things.
So I've never really thought of myself as a cook or a chef.
I never call myself a chef.
Madhur Jaffrey is, depending upon who you are and who you ask, an actress with a sweeping range of stage and cinematic roles who really got going with 1965's James Ivory directed Shakespeare Waller.
Or she's a TV cook who forever changed the way Britain eats with her pioneering BBC series Indian Cookery from the early 1980s and its accompanying best selling book of the same name.
It doesn't have to be that complicated though.
She says that she's an actress who played a lot of different parts.
I've always been suspicious, suspicious of my cookery career, she said.
Jaffrey was born in Delhi in 1933, the fifth of six children who played in the gardens and orchards on the banks of the Yamuna River.
After Indian stage and radio work, she went to London to study drama at RADA and found the food to be grey.
Her mother sent her heavily edited recipes by airmail and the young madhur tracked around the capital trying to find the right spices that would come in handy after time spent in New York working as an actress where Ismail Merchant introduced her to a food writer at the New York Times.
Before long, Knopf had published her first book of recipes, An Introduction to Indian Cooking in the uk.
The BBC were on the hunt for someone to front an Indian cooking program and the rest will have to be history, multiple series and the invention of the tie in cookbook later.
Madha Jaffrey is still acting and cooking at the age of 90.
I'm Robert Bound and I spoke to Madha Jaffrey on the Big Interview.
Mado, it's wonderful to have you on the program today on the Big Interview.
It's an honor to be in your company for the next half an hour.
I understand that you're on the cusp of an important birthday and I wondered as we have the expert on the line, what will you be cooking or what will you be having cooked for your birthday lunch?
I wonder.