Remember That Tang?

Meeting actress and cult cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey is a bit like sitting down to a set meal at a fine restaurant: the presentation is immaculate and the menu well-thought-out and skilfully prepared, with no eccentric flourishes calling unnecessary attention to themselves. Sitting legs curled daintily on the sofa, she's a girlish, slender 74, clad in black linen with tasteful gold jewellery. Beyond appearance, it's the sense of adventure and curiosity that she's retained since she was a girl—combined with a natural gift for recounting anecdotes—that have contributed to the thunderous success of all her cookbooks and TV shows.

Her very first book, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, was a quest to recapture all the subtle, delicious and myriad flavours of her childhood, with the aid of her mother's recipes, when she was a 20-year-old student in England—a country which then equated Indian cuisine with cheap curry houses and chicken tikka, washed down with beer. The most recent, The Ultimate Curry Bible, traces the history of migrations through the many hybrid forms of Indian cuisine that came about—from Guyana and Trinidad to Sri Lanka and Singapore. She's now at work on a new cookbook, but won't reveal what it's about.

What has set Jaffrey's books apart and continues to do so is the accessible, sensuous manner in which she shares these discoveries with the reader, peppered with little supplementary asides from history, her childhood, or her travels. Which means that you're not just following a set of instructions, but recreating a whole socio-cultural or historical experience. It's no longer greasy chicken bhuna, thrown together by a Bangladeshi cook whose patrons expect or know of nothing better; it's scores of options, each handed down from generation to generation, with its own particular context and history.

"Food doesn't exist in a vacuum," Jaffrey explains. "It belongs to a tradition. I like to place it, give it a detailed background." This interest in exploring histories through food was behind her idea to travel and do a food show in the early '80s, something that's now become a formula on travel channels. "How better to place a cuisine? To talk about the boatman's curry on a boat in the backwaters and say, this is where the karimeen comes from and here's where you get the coconut oil that it's been cooked in."

It's the adventurous, no-holds-barred desire to "know more", sparked by her travels, that makes her equally at home sampling rats, bats, cats and field mice in remote villages, as well as $1,000-per-cover meals put together by celebrity chefs at the glitziest restaurants in the world. "Wherever I travel, I love eating what the local people eat, discovering what makes up their palate, the textures and flavours they hunger for from childhood. In Japan, for example, everybody eats dried squid in the movie theatre. So that's what I do! I buy myself a packet of dried squid and watch a movie! Likewise, I think anyone who wants to understand Indian food must taste churan, the khatta chaat masala taste which we grow up eating."

This gustatory memory—an ability to remember everything you've tried before—is what distinguishes someone who's learnt a few recipes from someone who's mastered them. "The ability to improvise is all in the palate. My husband is a violinist and just as he's born with a perfect pitch, a perfect ear and remembers everything he's heard, I was born with a good palate, to have constant constants by the ability to remember everything I've tasted. You can improvise only when you can taste before you cook."

This quality of 'taste memory', she believes, is essential for food critics. Only then will they be able to tell whether a restaurant is good, its experiments successful, if it's stuck to a culinary tradition or contemporised it, or, in plainer terms, whether the quality of the food they serve has remained constant or plummeted. "Only people with a palate can distinguish these things—to say, this time, they've left out the ginger and over-fried it. How do you tell such things without the ability to remember?"

Taste memory and understanding food in its context also makes or breaks 'fusion cuisine', a culinary phenomenon that's both touted as the new big thing and decried by purists as faddish and pretentious. "Fusion food is as good as the chef preparing it," Jaffrey says. "If they're talented, it's very good and very exciting and if they're just following strange ideas, it's mindless." But fusion food has always existed, through trading in ancient times, through wars and invasions.

As Jaffrey points out, we might consider chickpeas our own, but they originally came from Afghanistan in the Middle Ages. We got chillies, potatoes and tomatoes only a few hundred years ago, from the west. And what we now consider the traditional cuisine of the Chettiars, a trading community from Tamil Nadu, was influenced by their desire to recreate what they tasted when they travelled to Burma, Malaya and Ceylon in the 19th century.

What partly accounts for some chefs' "fusion-confusion", though, is that the process of assimilating new cuisines, which took place over centuries, now gets telescoped into two or three years, she observes, thanks to our instant access to other cuisines and ingredients in our frequent-flying global age.

"If the cuisine has had time to be understood, it comes out digested," she explains. But if this process of absorption has not taken place at all, the food that comes out is downright indigestible. "For example, I recently saw a chef throw mustard seeds on a salad because he thought they looked good. But as we know, mustard seeds taste pungent unless they're roasted or fried."

A good place to try fusion that's pulled off well would be Jaffrey's New York home, should you ever happen to be invited. While she enjoys cooking Thai, Japanese, Italian or French cuisine, she's never allowed to cook anything other than the cuisine her name has now become synonymous with overseas. "The dreadful thing is, when I have guests over, I can't just give them roast chicken, they always expect an Indian meal!" says Jaffrey. "So I try to give them a taste of different parts of India, and do a bit of fusion myself."