Madhur Jaffrey - Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India

Sweet as Honey? Winter in Delhi:
The Season of Weddings The Caterer as
Magician Lessons in Taste

I was born in my grandparents' sprawling house by the Yamuna River in Delhi. Grandmother welcomed me into this world by writing Om, which means I am in Sanskrit, on my tongue with a little finger dipped in honey.

Perhaps that moment was reinforced in my tiny head a month or so later, when the family priest came to draw up my horoscope. He scribbled astrological symbols on a long scroll, and declared that my name should be Indrani, or Goddess of the Heavens. My father, who never paid religious functionaries the slightest bit of attention, firmly named me Madhur, which means Sweet as Honey, an adjective from the Sanskrit noun madhu, or honey. My grandfather, apparently, teased my father, saying that he should have named me Manbhari, or I am sated, instead, as I was already the fifth child. But my father continued to procreate, and I was left with honey on my palate and in my deepest soul.

My sweet tooth remained firmly in control until the age of four, when, emulating the passions of grown-ups, I began to explore the hot and the sour. My grandfather had built his house in what was once a thriving orchard of jujubes, mulberries, tamarinds, and mangoes. His numerous grandchildren, like hungry flocks of birds, attacked the mangoes while they were still green and sour. As grown-ups snored through the hot afternoons in rooms cooled with wetted, sweet-smelling vetiver curtains, the unsupervised children were on every branch of every mango tree, armed with a ground mixture of salt, pepper, red chilies, and roasted cumin. The older children, on the higher branches, peeled and sliced the mangoes with penknives and passed the slices down to the smaller fry on the lower branches. We would dip the slices into our spice mixture and eat, our tingling mouths telling us that we had ceased to be babies.

Winters were another matter. That was when the vegetable garden came into its own. Around eleven each morning, between breakfast and lunch, we would be served fresh tomato juice made from our own tomatoes. At about the same time, the gardener would offer the ladies sunning themselves on the veranda a basket full of fresh peas, small kohlrabies, white radishes, and feathery chickpea shoots. Some of these we ate raw, and the rest were sent off to the kitchen after a studied appraisal (Radishes sweeter than last year, no?). As this was also the season when the men went hunting, the kitchen was deluged with mallards, geese, quail, partridge, and venison as well.

Dinners were fairly generous affairs, with about forty or more members of the extended family sitting down to venison kebabs laden with cardamom, tiny quail with hints of cinnamon, chickpea shoots stir-fried with green chilies and ginger, and tiny new potatoes browned with flecks of cumin and mango powder.

Winter was also the season of weddings. My father was always in charge of the caterers, and I was his permanent sidekick. In those days caterers had to cook at their clients' homes, and, certainly in our home, they had to cook under family supervision. So a gang of about a dozen caterers would arrive a few days before the actual wedding and set up their tent under the tamarind tree.

First my father would examine all the raw ingredients. Were the spices wormy? Were there broken grains in the Basmati rice? Were the cauliflower heads taut and young?

The outward suspicion from one side and obsequious reassurances from the other were a game that each side dutifully played. In reality, we loved these caterers, who were known for the magic in their hands. They could conjure up the lamb meatballs of our erstwhile Moghul emperors and the tamarind chutneys of the street with equal ease. One of the few dishes that they alone cooked was cauliflower stems. For one meal they would cook the cauliflower heads. Then they were left with hundreds of coarse central stems. They cleverly slit the stems into quarters and stir-fried them in giant woklike karhais with sprinklings of cumin, coriander, chilies, ginger, and lots of sour mango powder. All I had to do was place a stem in my mouth, clamp down with my teeth, and pull. Just as with artichoke leaves, all the spicy flesh would remain on my tongue as the coarse skin was drawn away and discarded.

Decades later, in New York City, when the culinary guru and my friend and neighbor, James Beard, was very ill, I helped him teach some of his last classes. One of them was on taste. The students were made to taste nine different types of caviar and a variety of olive oils, and do a blind identification of meats with all their fat removed. Somewhere towards the end of the class, the big, frail man, confined to a high director's chair, asked, Do you think there is such a thing as taste memory?