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

Jaffrey, Madhur

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 140004295X ISBN 13: 9781400042951

Publisher: Knopf, 2006

Synopsis

Today’s most highly regarded writer on Indian food gives us an enchanting memoir of her childhood in Delhi in an age and a society that has since disappeared.

Madhur (meaning “sweet as honey”) Jaffrey grew up in a large family compound where her grandfather often presided over dinners at which forty or more members of his extended family would savor together the wonderfully flavorful dishes that were forever imprinted on Madhur’s palate.

Climbing mango trees in the orchard, armed with a mixture of salt, pepper, ground chilies, and roasted cumin; picnicking in the Himalayan foothills on meatballs stuffed with raisins and mint and tucked into freshly fried pooris; sampling the heady flavors in the lunch boxes of Muslim friends; sneaking tastes of exotic street fare—these are the food memories Madhur Jaffrey draws on as a way of telling her story. Independent, sensitive, and ever curious, as a young girl she loved uncovering her family’s many-layered history, and she was deeply affected by their personal trials and by the devastating consequences of Partition, which ripped their world apart.

Climbing the Mango Trees is both an enormously appealing account of an unusual childhood and a testament to the power of food to evoke memory. And, at the end, this treasure of a book contains a secret ingredient—more than thirty family recipes recovered from Madhur’s childhood, which she now shares with us.

About this title

About the Author:

Madhur Jaffrey is the author of many previous cookbooks, including the classic An Invitation to Indian Cooking and Madhur Jaffrey’s Taste of the Far East, which was voted Best International Cookbook and Book of the Year for 1993 by the James Beard Foundation. She is also an award-winning actress with numerous major motion pictures to her credit. She lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Ground Lamb with Peas (Keema Matar)
Serves 4–6

I cannot imagine our picnics or train rides in India without this dish. For my grandchildren, growing up in America, it is an all-time favorite. Sometimes we eat it with pooris, the deep-fried puffed breads, as we did so often in India, and sometimes with rice. When cooking for the children, I leave out all the chilies, whether the powdered red kind or the fresh green variety. My parents did the same for us when we were growing up.

I use low-fat yogurt, but you may use whole-milk yogurt if you prefer.

1 cup plain yogurt
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon ground coriander
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
One 2-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and grated to a pulp
3 good-sized cloves garlic, peeled and crushed to a pulp
2 pounds ground lamb
4 tablespoons peanut or olive oil
2 sticks cinnamon, about 2 inches each in length
4 whole cardamom pods
2 bay leaves
1 medium onion, peeled and finely chopped
1/2 cup puréed tomatoes (also labeled strained tomatoes or passata)
1 1/2 cups fresh (or frozen and defrosted) peas
3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh cilantro
1–2 finely chopped fresh bird's eye or cayenne-type green chiles
1 teaspoon garam masala (see recipe below)

Put the yogurt in a bowl and whisk lightly until smooth and creamy. Add the turmeric, cayenne, cumin, coriander, salt, ginger, and garlic. Mix until well blended.

Put the lamb into a large bowl. Pour the yogurt mixture over the top and mix (I use my hands) until thoroughly blended. There should not be any pools of yogurt left.

Pour the oil into a large (preferably nonstick) sauté pan and set over medium-high heat. When it is hot, put in the cinnamon, cardamom, and bay leaves. Stir once or twice, and then add the onion. Stir and fry about 5 minutes, or until the onion pieces are reddish brown.

Add all the meat. Stir and cook, breaking up the meat until no lumps and no pinkness are left, about 5 minutes.

Add the tomato purée and stir it in. Bring to a simmer. Cover, turn the heat to medium-low, and cook for 30 minutes, stirring every 6–7 minutes and making sure there is enough liquid so the lamb does not stick to the bottom. Uncover. Most of the liquid should have evaporated by this time. Stir and fry the meat for the next 5 minutes, removing and discarding the cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, and bay leaves. After 5 minutes, spoon out as much of the fat as you can and discard it. Now put in the peas, cilantro, green chilies (if desired), garam masala, and 6 tablespoons water. Mix, cover and cook on low heat another 6–7 minutes, or until tender.


Garam Masala
Makes about 3 tablespoons

An aromatic spice mixture made with the more expensive "warming" spices, this is generally, though not always, used towards the end of a cooking period to add a rich but still delicate whiff of elegance. It may be bought, already prepared, in spice stores, but generally has too many filler spices such as cumin and coriander and not enough of the more expensive cardamom and cinnamon. Indian grocers sell cardamom seeds already removed from their pods. Nutmegs are soft and may be broken by tapping with a hammer. Here is a family recipe.

1 tablespoon cardamom seeds
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
1 teaspoon whole black cumin seeds
1 teaspoon whole cloves
About 2/3 of a nutmeg
One 2-inch stick of cinnnamon, broken up into small pieces
Put all the spices into the container of a spice grinder or clean coffee grinder and grind as finely as possible. Store in a tightly lidded jar, away from sunlight. It will keep for several months.
ONE
The orchard site had housed our family homestead only since the early decades of the twentieth century. My family actually came from the walled city, often called Old Delhi, just to the south, built by the Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan in the seventeenth century. My family referred to it simply as Shahar, or the City.
There are many Delhis, as we were to study in school, all built either alongside each other or wholly or partly on top of each other, often reusing building materials knocked down in bloody efforts at domination. Our own original family home was in Chailpuri, in the narrow lanes of the Old City. It had as its carefully chosen foundation sturdy stones “borrowed” from the walls of Ferozshah Kotla, the fourteenth-century fortress and palace of a fourteenth- century emperor in a fourteenth-century Delhi.
Starting with the ancient Vedic city of Indraprastha, which flourished in the fifteenth century B.C., a succession of Delhis was built, first by generations of Hindu rajas, only to be followed in A.D. 1193 by a roll call of Muslim dynasties: Ghori, Ghaznavi, Qutubshahi, Khilji, Tughlak, Lodhi, and Moghul. They seemed to trust the dubious comfort of walled cities, and their leaders chose to name Delhi, again and again, after themselves. This ended, at least from the point of view of my childhood, with the British version, sans walls, New Delhi, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and built in the ruin- filled wilderness south of the Old City walls.
The Moghul capital, Shahjahanabad, or the Old City or the City, or Shahar, was where the written history of my family began. We were only blessed with our paternal side of it. My mother’s side either kept few records or humbly kept its accomplishments under wraps. This written history, bound in red, was kept in my grandfather’s home office.
When my grandfather—Babaji, as we called him—decided to move out of the City to the orchard estate, he was already a very successful barrister. His new house, the one in which I was born, was a brick- and-plaster version of a multi-roomed, grand Moghul tent with bits of British fortress and Greco-Roman classicism thrown in to hint vaguely at grandeur. The road it was built on was named after my grandfather, Raj Narain Road (with the patriotic Hindification of names that followed Independence, it is now Raj Narain Marg), and had the number 7 on its front gate. From the time I can remember, we always referred to that house as Number 7, as in “I’m going to Number 7,” or “You know that big tamarind tree in Number 7. . . .”
Not wishing to waste money, and full of the brio of someone recently “England-returned” (he had been studying law in London), he designed it all himself. As the family story goes, it was at this time that the British had decided to move their capital from Calcutta to Delhi, and Lutyens was in the process of building the new capital, to be named New Delhi. Lutyens asked my grandfather to pick any piece of land in New Delhi and build on it—Lutyens might have designed the house himself had my grandfather asked—but my grandfather dismissed the whole idea, saying, “Who wants to live in that jungle?” Properties in “that jungle” are now worth as much as those in central London and midtown Manhattan.
Years later, having proceeded beyond my three score and ten years, I was awarded an honorary CBE (Commander of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II in Washington, D.C., another city designed by Lutyens, in a house also designed by Lutyens, the British ambassador’s residence. As I stared at my reflection there in a pair of dark Lutyens mirrors, dotted with glass rosettes, I couldn’t help thinking that my life might have come full-circle. I could have been born in a Lutyens house and received a grand recognition of my life in a Lutyens house. But I was not destined for such easy symmetry, for easy anything.
Babaji’s whitewashed house consisted of a central “gallery”—a hall, really—leading to five very large rooms with fireplaces. One of these was the drawing room, and the others served as bedrooms, one to a family. Running along the front and back of the house were two long verandas lined with semi-classical, semi–Greco-Roman pillars. The back, east-facing veranda looked out on the Yamuna River, or, as we called it with great familiarity, the Jumna River. It was here that so many of us, as infants, were rubbed with oil and left to absorb the morning sun. Because the land must have sloped down to the water, this veranda was one floor up, built over a very large, partially underground, damp, always cool cellar or taikhana. My grandfather used to make wine here from grapes he imported from Afghanistan, but that must have been before I was born.
The front, west veranda faced the gardens, which had incorporated the remnants of the old orchard and now included a winding drive to the front gate. The front and back verandas ended in rooms at each corner of the house, the front ones being shaped somewhat like turrets. The functions of these corner rooms changed over the years, but one of them at the back, facing east and south, always remained my grandmother’s—and the family’s—chapel-like, Pooja ka Kamra or Prayer Room. On top of the house were two levels of flat roofs, the one in the center being higher, and both edged with a battlement-like balustrade.
But the main house was not large enough to fit the only army Babji was to see, a growing army of spirited grandchildren produced by his eight children. Some of these progeny lived at Number 7 all the time, and some came and went. Babaji firmly believed in the joint-family system, with himself presiding as the head of his brood, a system that...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 140004295X
• ISBN 13: 9781400042951
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320