Climbing The Mango Tree by Madhur Jaffrey

My spouse and I picked this out to listen to while traveling by car together because the author is an icon in cooking. She is the most recognizable Indian cookbook author in America and the most prolific. This is not about that at all, but it is still worth a listen. Daniel Boulard encourages aspiring cooks to explore what they know, to understand the food of the culture that they grew up in, and the India of Jaffrey's youth was very multi-cultural before independence and partition. She had a very privledged childhood, in which her barrister grandfather lived on a road that was named after him and the family had a full-blown folk tale about its origin, involving an ancient kingdom and a massacre from which one infant boy was saved by the sheltering wings of a kite. This bird became the tutelary goddess of the family, henceforth held sacred by all its descendants. While the memoir is not about food, her taste memories sparkle with enthusiasm, and her talent for conveying them makes the book relentlessly appetizing. She provides many family recipes (which we did not listen to), including one for split-pea fritters, as well as directions for preparing both traditional and easy tamarind chutney. The whole package — fritters, yogurt, chili mixture and chutney — is a stupendous dish, and not too hard to make at home. But the full magic of Jaffrey’s description has less to do with the chaat’s extraordinary flavor than with the presence of the khomcha-wallah and the wondering appetite of a child. This is worth having a go at, but it is not about the cookbooks so much as it is about the author.