Servants. The Missing Link in Culinary Change
Here’s a story about servants. Brigid Keenen, wife of a British diplomat in waning years of the last century, wrote a memoir. Perhaps her particular kind of British humor does not appeal to everyone, though I just love it, but that’s not the point here. The point is her story about servants and recipes.
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 some Indian food would be nice. Small problem. Hari only knew how to cook Korean chicken.
(An aside here. The assumption that servants in a foreign country know how to cook the middle class foods of that country is mistaken. Their repertoire is usually very small and restricted to the few things they can afford, or that they have learned from former employers).
So Mrs Keenan whipped out her copy of Madhur Jaffrey’s Invitation to Indian Cooking. Why didn’t Hari use it to learn to cook Indian food? Why not start with“the Moghlai Chicken Braised with Almonds and Raisins on page 39.”
(Another aside. This dish with expensive chicken, almonds and raisins was part of court cookery, a world away from Hari’s experience).
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.
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 Moghlai Chicken for another diplomatic family. His wife Meena perhaps prepares it for their own family, at least on special occasions.
So Indian court cookery reinterpreted in well-to-do Indian family, sent to daughter studying in England, written up in her cookbook, taken back to India by diplomatic wife, taught to Indian servant, maybe now entering into his family’s repertoire.
“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.”
I won’t go into the entire back story about my comment. But on a related note I remember my parents talking about the abundance of their family tables before the Korean War. Both wondered what happened to all the leftovers that “just disappeared to the back of the house (or rather compound)”
Um, forgotten servants?
Interesting post Rachel. I didn’t know about Madhur Jaffrey’s background. This post goes well with your thesis that most cookbook writers of the past had servants.
I think if one looks at the socio-economic realities of past kitchens as well as historical food production, distribution and storage infrastructures– they point to SERVANTS!