Rachel Laudan

Here’s a story to mull over. It’s so good I’m not going to comment for now. Brigid Keenen is the wife of a British diplomat who wrote a book about her experiences. The humor is a particularly British kind that doesn’t appeal to everyone, though I was very glad of it on a 12 hour flight from Heathrow to Houston. This particular story caught my attention.

Newly arrived in New Delhi, Mrs Keenan sallied forth to hire servants. She found an Indian couple, Hari and Meena. Hari was to be the cook, his wife Meena was to do the cleaning.

Mrs Keenan thought that it would be nice to have some Indian food. Small problem. The one thing that Hari knew how to cook was Korean chicken.

So Mrs Keenan whipped out her copy of Madhur Jaffrey’s Invitation to Indian Cooking. Why didn’t he work through it so he could learn to cook Indian food? A good place to begin would be the “the Moghlai Chicken Braised with Almonds and Raisins on page 39.”

Now to see the irony, you have to know a bit about Madhur Jaffrey’s background. And I did, just a little, having worked my way through the  Invitation to Indian Cooking in the 1970s and 80s. So I checked my stained and battered copy and, yes, I was right.

“Food—good food—just appeared miraculously from somewhere at the back of our house in Delhi . . . A bearer, turbaned, sashed, and barefooted would announce the meal and soon we would all be sitting around the dinner table, a family of six,” says Madhur Jaffrey.

When Madhur Jaffrey arrived in England to study drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she naturally had not the faintest clue about cooking. She wrote home and the letters she got back about the classic Mughal dishes prepared by their cooks are the basis of the Invitation to Indian Cooking.

Well, now Madhur Jaffrey has had a second career as a cookbook writer even more distinguished than her career on the stage. Mrs Keenan and her husband have moved on to Khazakstan where perhaps another cook is learning to prepare Moghlai Chicken. Hari is doubtless preparing authentic Indian Muglai Chicken for another diplomatic family. His wife Meena perhaps prepares it for their own family, at least on special occasions.

Servants in the loop anyone?