When Will Indian Food Be American? With Priya Krishna & Madhur Jaffrey (Live)

In 1973, Madhur Jaffrey penned An Invitation to Indian Cooking and introduced many Americans to Indian cuisine. More than 50 years later, Priya Krishna (author of Indian-ish and Priya’s Kitchen Adventures) argues that Indian food is just as American as any other immigrant cuisine. But among many non-South Asians in the US, Indian food still carries the perception that it’s “foreign.”

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

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• 1:23Dan Pashman?

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• 1:42Dan Pashman?

  This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. And we're coming to you live from the Jerome L. Green Performance Space in New York City.

• 2:04Dan Pashman?

  In 1973, Madhur Joffrey released her first cookbook, "An Invitation to Indian Cooking." She introduced many Americans to Indian cuisine. That book is now in the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame. Since then, Madhur has written 30 more cookbooks and evolved her work as Indian food has become more familiar to Americans. The most recent of her cookbooks is from 2019, Madhur Jaffrey's Instantly Indian Cookbook: Modern and Classic Recipes for the Instant Pot. Priya Krishna is a food writer and video host for The New York Times. She's the author of three cookbooks, including the bestseller, "Indian-ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family." That book includes a lot of classic recipes, but Priya also tears down the walls between Indian cuisine and the many others that have influenced her with dishes like

• 2:46Dan Pashman?

  roti pizza. Through the work of these two writers, we see Indian food trying to assimilate into mainstream American culture over the last 50-plus years. At our live event, we asked, "What does this tell us about the way immigrants themselves assimilate?" We began with Madhur Jaffrey. In the 1950s, she moved from India to London and New York to pursue an acting career. So, how did she end up introducing Americans to Indian food?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  It's an odd kind of tale. I came to be an actress, and I'd studied at RADA, which is the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. And I thought, you know, I'll get work. But I looked like I look. And at that time, I had a very British accent. I looked like an Indian. And nobody wanted to hire me because there were no parts that I could play. They couldn't think of me as an American. They had to think of me as some Indian or Asian or Middle Eastern or generally dancing, singing girl type of role. And there were other people who looked more the part. I just didn't. I was an actress, and I was not there to play these roles of these

• 3:56Speaker 01

  southern girls and dance around with an elephant, or it's just not what I was trained, highly trained, to do. So, I didn't get any part. So, I didn't know how to make a living. So, I started writing. And then, somebody asked me to do a piece on what I ate as a child. And that sort of hijacked me into the world of cooking. I was approached by a freelance editor saying, "Will you do a cookbook?" Well, nothing came of that. But eventually, a cookbook was formed, and that was the invitation to Indian cooking.

• 4:30Dan Pashman?

  But am I right? You didn't cook a lot as a kid?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  I didn't cook at all.

• 4:36Dan Pashman?

  You weren't like, you weren't, we hear these stories of, you know, from anywhere of like, sort of, the kid who grows up at the mother's feet in the kitchen chopping the vegetables.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  No, none of that. I grew up with wonderful food coming to me at the table. I didn't have to lift a finger to do it, and I didn't learn anything.

• 4:54Dan Pashman?

  So, how did you learn to cook?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Well, when I was in London, and at that time, this was 1957, 58, there were no good Indian restaurants at that time, none at all. I didn't know what to do with myself. And I would be up in the canteen on the fifth floor of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, I remember, and be eating that pale gray roast beef and mashed potatoes and cabbage that were all watery and tasteless. And I would be dreaming about Indian food. And so, I started writing letters to my mother. And I said, "Please, please, please, teach me how to cook simple dishes. I want a cauliflower and potato dish. I want a meat dish with whole spices that I loved, a goat meat

• 5:40Speaker 01

  dish. And one other thing, a dal I wanted to know how to cook." So, she sent me three-line recipes. "Take this and then add a little bit of that and bhuno it," as they would say, "stir-fry it a little bit. And then, when it's ready, it's done."

• 5:58Speaker 01

  So, the funny thing that I didn't discover then, but I discovered maybe 20, 30 years later, is that obviously, I had a palate and therefore, a taste memory. And I could recall what the dish tasted like. So, with my mother's vague instructions, I was able to pull it together and create that taste that I had grown up with. So, that's how I learned.

• 6:27Dan Pashman?

  And Priya, your mom is also a huge influence on you and your cooking, to the point that she is credited on the cover of your book as a co-author. Did you grow up cooking with your mom?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  I grew up doing my math homework on the kitchen island and like, watching my mom cook. But she always had this thing, "I'm left-handed." And in Indian culture, like, being a left-handed person is like even worse than it is in American culture. So, she was like, "You can't hold a knife. Like, you can't do basic tasks." So, I would just like quietly do my homework and watch her cook. And she would have me taste things for salt. And that was pretty much it.

• 7:04Dan Pashman?

  Has your mom come around on the whole left-handed thing?

• 7:07Speaker 02

  No, she hasn't. She really hasn't.

• 7:09Dan Pashman?

  She still thinks you can't cook?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  I mean, it's so funny. She'll come over to my apartment, and like, I am a food writer, and I now have a cookbook of her recipes. And I had made her like a locki kee sabzi. It's like a really simple, like, bottle gourd dish. And it like, could not be more simple. The instructions were like, "Put the locki in the pan, add tomatoes, lime." And I like, made this for her, and she tasted it. And she was like, she calls me chhotu, which means little one in Hindi. She was like, "Chhotu?" And then, she texted a photo to like, all 30 members of our extended family, being like, "Chhotu made me locki kee sabzi." And I was like, "It is in the cookbook that I authored. So, I would hope that I would be able to make the easiest dish in my cookbook."

• 7:56Dan Pashman?

  I want to talk a bit about your cookbooks. We have three cookbooks up here on the stage. We have Madhur's original, "Invitation to Indian Cooking, 1973." And then, we have each of your new cookbooks. And I want to talk a little bit about the idea of a target audience. So, Madhur, 1973, your cookbook's coming out. Who did you consider to be the target audience?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  You know, I knew so little about most things at that time. I didn't even think of a target audience. I was thinking, "I want Americans, just generally, vaguely, to cook Indian food and know Indian food. But I want them to know the real Indian food." Because they were all wanting, whoever I met would want to be invited to the house. Now, I couldn't feed everybody, though I tried. I had dinner party after dinner party. And people said, "We loved the food. And how do we cook it?" I said, "Um, I have to do something about it." So, I started writing the book. And I think the desire was really to write recipes as clearly

• 9:01Speaker 01

  and simply as possible, not give them millions of recipes, but just enough to get going with authentic, real Indian food. I don't know much myself, but the dishes I know from the city of Delhi, which I come from, that's what I was cooking, and that's what I loved. And I wanted to just pass on these wonderful recipes to other people. Because they seemed, whenever they came to my house, they loved them so much. So, I said, "I'll teach you how to make them."

• 9:29Dan Pashman?

  Right. You know, you can tell, I think, a lot about a writer and/or a publisher's intent by the cover of a book. You can judge a book by its cover. It's a myth, kids. The title is "An Invitation to Indian Cooking." The subtitle says, "Dishes I have savored since childhood, mostly the subtle spicy cooking of Delhi, carefully worked out for American cooks in American kitchens."

• 10:00Speaker 01

  I have never had anything to do with the cover

• 10:04Speaker 01

  of my books. When I have, they've been failures. So I now leave, and I have left in that case also, to my editor, everything, that whatever she wanted, she said, can you have some? Everyone thinks of Indian food and somehow draperies, cloth, Indian cloth. Can we put it on a saree? I said, no, you'll ruin the saree. You'll get oil spots on the saree. And then you have to wash it. No, you may not put it on a saree. So I love Indian hand-woven cloth. I've always been a champion of Indian hand weaving. So I happened to have this cloth that you see in the background of the book, lying around to make something with one day. And I brought that along.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  So I wore this gorgeous temple saree, something that Indians would know is very expensive, very old, and no one else would know what it is.

• 10:58Dan Pashman?

  At this point in your life, were you wearing sarees frequently in day-to-day life?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  I did, yes. I was. I was. Also, the title was not chosen by me. It was chosen by Judith Jones, who was my editor.

• 11:10Dan Pashman?

  Right. The legendary cookbook editor, who also was Julia Child's cookbook editor.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 11:16Dan Pashman?

  Right, so I get it that you didn't make the choices on this cover, but I think that we can still learn something from what were Americans' perceptions of Indian food? What choices did the public sure feel that they had to make to sell the book in 1973? They wanted it to look distinctly Indian, I might even say foreign, to the average American's eyes. But yet, to put the words right on the cover, "Carefully worked out for American cooks in American kitchens", as if to say, like, this is really, this is kind of different and exotic, but you can handle it, people.

• 11:50Dan Pashman?

  Now I look at the cover of your book, Priya. So you and I had emailed a little bit. You told me the book was coming out. I was already a fan of your work. I was like, cool, let's check out the book. And I was kind of like, this is interesting, maybe we should do something with this. And then I saw the cover. And that's when I was like, whoa. Like, this is different from what the stereotype of a traditional Indian cookbook would be. Can you describe the cover to people, for listeners who aren't here in the room with us?

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. It's sort of this, like, highly saturated tableau of like, what a dinner party at our house would look like with roti pizza, a char made of cherry tomatoes, dal topped with caramelized onions, olives cooked with bay leaves and long Kashmiri red chilies. And overlaying over that, there's like a little yellow wrap, and then an illustration by the Pakistani-Canadian artist Maria Kamar of my mom, dressed as Rosie the Riveter, saying, "You can cook it", instead of, "We can do it."

• 12:52Dan Pashman?

  And then, you know, whereas the subtitle on Madhur's book is "Carefully worked out for American cooks", your site subtitle is "Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family", that also seems like a very conscious choice.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a very intentional choice. I was thinking a lot about how in categories like on Amazon, they separate books from American and international. And any book that basically isn't like roast chicken is put into the like international category. But like, I was born in America. I was raised in America. My parents now have lived in America longer than they lived in India. We are as American as the roast chicken people. So I just like wanted to, I don't know, I just like wanted to make it very clear, like, this is an Indian cookbook, but it's also an American cookbook. We can be both. They're not mutually exclusive things.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  So in a way, we are still explaining ourselves and wooing people.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  We are not there yet.

• 13:53Dan Pashman?

  So Madhar and Priya are still explaining themselves, but they aren't doing it the same way. Coming up, we'll discuss their different approaches. Stick around.

• 14:11Speaker 03

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• 17:00Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman, and I hope I'll see you this Sunday at the 92nd Street Y in New York, where I will be interviewing chef Alon Shaya about his new cookbook, Memories of a Good Meal: Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival. I love Alon's cooking. I cannot wait for this conversation. Get details and tickets at sporkful.com/live. All right, let's return now to my conversation with Madhar Joffrey and Priya Krishna, taped live on stage in New York. When we left off, we were talking about their efforts to get Indian cuisine to gain mainstream acceptance in America. As Madhar had put it, "We're still explaining ourselves. We're not there yet."

• 17:41Dan Pashman?

  I want to talk more about that wooing, to use your words, because that's present in all three of your books, from 1973 to 2019. But I think you each have, there are some similarities between the ways that you each do it, but there are also some differences.

• 17:59Dan Pashman?

  Priya, you decided not to translate and explain a lot of Hindi words for foods and ingredients, and not to italicize a lot of words. Why did you make that choice?

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Um, I hate when people like italicize, like dal or sabzi. I feel like people should know what a dal or a sabzi is, or at least be able to detect by context clues, like dal, and then I say lentils, sabzi, and then I like talk about vegetables. I made a last-minute choice to put some explainers in parentheses for the table of contents, because if you're not Indian and you just see Hindi in the table of contents, there's just, I can't expect you to know that that means okra. So, you know, there's something that says, like, you know, that is spiced okra. But throughout the book, I try to sort of interchangeably go between Hindi and English. I just tried, I think it's really important to sort of normalize those words.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  The more that we can normalize that language, the less that people will see it as, quote-unquote, exotic or an other.

• 19:03Dan Pashman?

  So I want to read a couple of quotes from each of these three cookbooks we're talking about, Madhur's 1973 book and your two new ones. So this is, this is you, Madhur, in 1973. "Don't feel compelled to plunge into Indian cooking with a full-scale banquet. An Indian soup with your meal one day, tomato chutney with your roast lamb the next, these are good beginnings. If you're in the habit of serving spaghetti in meat sauce, try rice and kima instead. It's a pleasant variation and equally simple." That's 1973. This is 2019. "Many of the recipes have more ingredients than you may be used to using. Don't let that worry you. I didn't want to dumb down India's authentic taste for this book. The foods in this book are very Indian, but you may eat them in as American a way as you like."

• 19:48Dan Pashman?

  And this is Priya, 2019. "Repeat after me, now in all caps, 'Indian food is everyday food.'

• 19:58Dan Pashman?

  If Indian food were actually hard to make, would billions of working Indian parents be whipping it up on the regular for their weeknight dinners? No."

• 20:10Dan Pashman?

  So a slightly different style, perhaps, from Priya, but a similar message. I wonder if the difference in your respective styles of wooing, to come back to that word, is reflective of a generational difference.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  You mean I'm more polite?

• 20:34Dan Pashman?

  Perhaps, yes. Well, but also, like, I, I, I, just based on other conversations I've had on this show with immigrants and second-generation Americans and, and third-culture kids and, you know, there's an idea that, you know, the, the person who, who's, who comes from another country, who is an immigrant here, comes with an attitude of like, keep your head down, don't rock the boat, go along to get along. And then when they have kids who are born here, those kids more often have an attitude of like, no, this is my country, I'll kick the door down if I have to.

• 21:10Dan Pashman?

  I mean, is that...

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Not true of me.

• 21:13Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  I rock the boat.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  All the time. I did it in India, I did it here, I think it's just my nature to keep rocking it.

• 21:23Dan Pashman?

  What, what's, what's some aspect of boat rocking in the food world that you're especially proud of?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Just going on publishing Indian books when people said, well, haven't you done enough Indian food? You've, it is as if there were 10 dishes, we have them now, and why, why are you bothering to do more? What is left? Is there anything left? I was asked this question many times, what is left to do? So, I mean, I, in the fact that I persisted, I persisted in several careers at the same time, and people said, you're wearing yourself thin. Well, I'm thin, I'm fine, I'm okay.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, I, I feel it very much with my parents. I think about just like the rise of turmeric and turmeric lattes, and me and all of my Indian friends who were born and raised in America are furious. Like, we have text threads where we're like, this white lady started like a turmeric latte company, and like, we're angry about it. And then we all like, call our parents, we're like, Mom, Dad, like, this white lady's profiting off of our heritage, like, we're pissed. And my mom's like, back in my day, like, people didn't even know what turmeric was. Like, I'm so amazed that this white woman would start an entire company about turmeric, like, how exciting. And it's just like this total change in perspective, and I feel like when my parents

• 22:51Speaker 02

  were just like, fighting to just be accepted, so they're just grateful to see it anywhere, and especially if someone non-Indian is making it. And I think that's also why there are a lot of Indians who use, even in India, who use the word curry, because they're just like, and the only way I can get white people to understand Indian food is if I use this word curry. But that word is sort of, kind of, empty.

• 23:15Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, Priya tells us why the word curry is meaningless, and I ask Madhur why one of her books has curry in the title. That's after the break, stick around.

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• 25:02Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back. Let's return now to our live show with Priya Krishna and Madhur Jaffrey in New York City. Madhur, you addressed this in your first cookbook. For folks who aren't familiar with this issue, what is the problem with the word curry?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  We don't say curry to anything, because curry is a generalization. It is as if you used one powder in every dish. So every dish would say, taste absolutely the same if you use the same curry powder in every dish. And what we are trying to show is this immense variety that India has, from coast to coast, from north to the Himalaya Mountains, to the Sri Lanka down in the south. It has vast offerings to make to people, and yet to call it curry is to limit it and dismiss it, in a way.

• 25:50Dan Pashman?

  And, I mean, tell me if this is a fair analogy, but, you know, like, asking for a curry in an Indian restaurant, or asking an Indian person to make you curry, it's like if you went into an Italian restaurant and were like, hey, can I get some pasta with sauce?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:02Dan Pashman?

  And, and they're like, well, well, you want like spaghetti bolognese, you want linguine, like, and you're like, no, you, the sauce. I want that sauce you make, I love your sauce, can you get me the sauce?

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  That's as, that's as idiotic as it sounds to us, when people say it.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  That, that would be correct.

• 26:18Dan Pashman?

  So, in, in...

• 26:22Dan Pashman?

  So, in 1973, Madhur, you wrote, "To me, the word curry is as degrading to India's great cuisine as the term chop suey was to China's. If curry is an oversimplified name for an ancient cuisine, then curry powder attempts to oversimplify and destroy the cuisine itself." Fast forward to 1996, and you released a book called Madhur Jaffrey Cooks Curries.

• 26:48Dan Pashman?

  You're blocking your ears.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:50Dan Pashman?

  So what happened?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  I got to the point, and this is in England, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  So they said, can we do a curry book? And I, I brought out my usual arguments, but it never went away, it never stayed behind me all the time. So I said, all right, you, if you think you can sell it that way, and they always presented it to me as if this is how we sell the book, and marketing is not my forte at all. So I said, all right, if you think this is what's going to sell the book, sell the book, take, call it curry's. I just gave up.

• 27:29Dan Pashman?

  And how did, how did it make you feel?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  I, it, I felt terrible, but the book sold.

• 27:43Dan Pashman?

  So, Priya, in your book, you write, "Why are there no curries in this book? Let me get another big misconception out of the way." Again, all caps.

• 27:56Dan Pashman?

  There is no such thing as curry. So you are picking up the fight that Madhur gave up on in 1996.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  She's young.

• 28:10Dan Pashman?

  What made you want to take up the mantle?

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Um, I was just so sick of the word, you know, seeing, you know, the word like curried chickpeas, curry, you know, like, in food magazines. I was just like, so sick of hearing that word, and sick of seeing Indian food reduced to something so simple, when these food magazines were exploring the breadth of French cooking and Italian cooking, and I wanted Indian food to sort of get that same respect. I wanted us to be able to call dishes by their names, which to me seems like such a simple ask, and yet, for years and years and years, we just insist on using this word curry, and, you know, there's a lot of, there, there used to be, there, you were like, double the capitalizations in the book.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  It was like, my main note back for my editor was like, too much all caps, yelling at the reader. But there were like, certain moments where I was like, this needs to be in all capital, capital letters, like, no such thing as curry, at least not the way that you know it. Like, there is a dish in the book called curry, which is a chickpea flour and yogurt-based soup, and it probably looks like what people might think of when they think of a curry, but it's not a curry at all, it's a curry.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Curry, curry.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Curry.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:26Dan Pashman?

  Totally different.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Totally different.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Totally different.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Made with chickpea flour and yogurt and things like that.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  My favorite soup of all time.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Mine, mine too.

• 29:34Dan Pashman?

  Oh, really? What, what do you like about it?

• 29:36Speaker 02

  It's just so tang, it's like tangy, it's got a little bit of nuttiness, you put the chonk over the top, it's got the sort of richness of the ghee, it's just, and the over white rice is just like a nice, being wrapped like a cozy blanket.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  It's so good.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  It's just amazing.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  And in, I don't know if you have that in your family, but we put pakoras.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  My mom is, my mom's pro pakora, I'm anti pakora.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm pro pakora. So you put these lovely, soft, spongy, and not many people know how to make them soft and spongy dumplings in it. So basically, it's chickpea flour thickened with thinned-out yogurt, and the sourer the yogurt, the better. So you've got this paste-like thing, and then you thin it out with lots of water, and then you cook it, and it becomes like a thick soup, and then you make the dumplings and you put them in, and you end by putting this tarka, or chalk, which is the final flavoring, which you heat oil or ghee, and then you put in certain spices, like cumin

• 30:43Speaker 01

  and mustard seeds, different people put different spices, and a chili, a red chili, and you throw it over and you stir it all together, and you eat it with white rice, and it is so delicious. It was one of our Sunday meals.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:57Dan Pashman?

  Priya, what's the anti-pakora argument?

• 31:01Speaker 02

  So I just don't like, like, things floating around in my curry. That's just, it's just, I've just felt this felt really strongly. I totally, I hear you and I understand why people like pakoras, like, they soak up the sauce in this very wonderful way, they've got lots of nooks and crannies, but I'm just such a purist, like, I just want rice, and then I want it, I sort of treat my curry sort of like a sauce. Like, you just, you don't want like, lumps in your sauce.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Oh, what good lumps.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  But this is like a real argument that we have in my house.

• 31:32Dan Pashman?

  I can tell, yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Because when we were growing up, like my mom would serve me curry with the pakoras and I would like pick out the pakoras and plop them back into the pot.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  I would take them.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  And she'd be like, that's the best part. What are you doing?

• 31:47Dan Pashman?

  So Madhur, in your first book in 73, you sort of wrote about what your hopes are, what you hope that this book would lead to long term. And you wrote, "Someday, I hope, books will be written about all of India's cuisines: Gujarati food, Malayali food, Punjabi food, Maharoshtrian food, Hindi food, Bengali food, thank you, Goan food, to name just a few."

• 32:15Dan Pashman?

  And Priya, in your book, you write, "I hope this book does well, largely so that publishers and consumers will take more chances on stories like this one, which don't fit the mold of what has dominated the cookbook genre for so long: a mostly whitewashed interpretation of America and its food. I wish for a day when dal chowle is as normalized a Monday night meal as spaghetti or grilled chicken."

• 32:40Dan Pashman?

  It's interesting because when we first had the idea for this event, we were like, well, it's gonna be great. We're gonna trace this arc from 1973 to today. We're gonna see the progress. And to be sure, some things have changed. And certainly, Indian ingredients are easier to find and there is some increased awareness. But I can't help but note that those two, your respective hopes from 1973 and 2019, sound awfully similar to each other. What do you think, Madhur, hearing that?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Still hoping the same, you know? And books are coming out. They're by publishers who are not very well-known. Very often, some are self-published. But there are books and you can go online. So I find that a very interesting stage to have arrived at.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'd like to, I think, of course, we've gone, we've gone further than we were when I was a kid. But yeah, I still sit in magazine meetings and I'm told my five-ingredient recipe is too complicated. Like, it's just, it's just the reality of, of, of how things are. And it's, it's annoying to have to sort of be on the defensive. And like, the fact that I, like, my publisher was like, we need to put the word accessible, like, on the back of the book. Like, we need to make sure that that's front and center. But yeah, I still hope for a day where, where, I mean, like, I find making dal chowle

• 34:14Speaker 02

  much simpler than cooking pasta or making grilled chicken. I think it's easier. I'm, I would consider myself a relatively lazy cook. So, yeah, I just, I, a part of me is always like, what am I not understanding here? You know?

• 34:31Dan Pashman?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, and I've heard from Indian-American cookbook authors who try to pitch a book and they get told by a publisher, well, we already have an Indian cookbook.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:41Dan Pashman?

  As if, well, that box has been checked. Okay, you know?

• 34:46Dan Pashman?

  You know, I mean, I do think that there is something just about familiarity, you know? Like, my mother-in-law is a very good cook and she has all these recipes that she can cook from memory that she's been cooking. You know, she's from Eastern Europe. She knows, she can cook 100 different meat and potatoes dishes from memory and they're always great. I'll cook like roasted broccoli. And I'll just like olive oil and salt and like char it, you know, at 450. And it's just not like, she didn't grow up with broccoli.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Or charred broccoli.

• 35:16Dan Pashman?

  Or charred, right. And she'll be like, this is so good. How do you do it? And I'm like, it's so easy. You just put olive oil and salt on it. You roasted it 450 for 10 minutes. It's like the easiest thing. And she's like, can you write it down? Like, what? I don't, you know? And so, I don't know what it, what it will take.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  See, here's the thing. It's alien to whom.

• 35:37Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  America is made up of people from all over the world. There are people from Congo. There are people from Nigeria. So it's alien for some people. Now, they may be a greater percentage, but for some, it is not that alien. They know some of these, Somali and Ethiopian would know some of these spices. So when we generalize like that, we are not thinking of America as an immigrant nation, which it is. So maybe if we present it the right way, I myself know that it hasn't worked so far for Indian cookbooks. It's been hard. It's been a tough road to hoe for most of us.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  But we keep trying because we think somewhere it'll break through and get a wider audience.

• 36:32Dan Pashman?

  Big hand for Priya Krishna.

• 36:41Dan Pashman?

  And please, big hand for Madhur Jaffrey.

• 36:47Dan Pashman?

  And a big hand for all of you. Thank you so much for coming out. Good night.

• 36:56Dan Pashman?

  That's Priya Krishna from The New York Times. She's the author of "Indianish and Priya's Kitchen Adventures: A Cookbook for Kids." You can find her @PriyaKrishna on Instagram. And Madhur Joffrey is the author of more than 30 cookbooks, including her most recent, "Instantly Indian." Next week on the show, how did craft breweries become a place for kids? And should they be a place for kids? We investigate. That's next week. While you're waiting for that one, check out last week's episode with Gabrielle Lescano, a former body positivity influencer who now thinks the movement has gone too far. That one's up now. And hey, if you want to hear new episodes of The Sporkful ad-free, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit siriusxm.com/podcastplus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice.

• 37:42Dan Pashman?

  This show is produced by me along with senior producer And Sandy. And associate producer

• 37:46Speaker 04

  Gofen Putubule.

• 37:48Dan Pashman?

  Our editor is Gianna Palmer. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. The Sporkful team now also includes Emma Morgenstern and Adre Suhara. Music help from Black Label Music. And special thanks to all of our friends at The Green Space for their help with this live episode. The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcast. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 38:07Speaker 06

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