In this series, I'm going to show you how to cook all kinds of Indian food.
Some of it you may be familiar with the kind of food you've had in Indian restaurants,
and some of it you've probably never eaten it’s the kind of food you get in Indian
homes.
When my programme came on air, there weren't any cookery programmes, not Indian cookery.
It was an immediate hit and nobody expected that.
Madhur Jaffrey grew up in Delhi but left in her twenties to study acting in London at
RADA.
A mission to excite Western palates led to her being described as the original Spice
Girl.
It was an educational programme, so people were supposed to learn from it, learn culture.
What makes Indian food Indian really is a mixture, a blend of selected spices.
The most important element became the excitement of the cooking.
One of the things I am going to make is Rogan Josh, this is a classical
north Indian classical dish, it’s lamb in a red rich sauce.
I wanted people to have the authentic Indian food from homes and to give recipes to specific
regions of India.
So people understood that Indian food is not hot, hotter, hottest.
It all started with the people in the studio.
They loved the smells.
The minute I finished cooking they were ready to eat.
It was last September when Madhur Jaffrey began her cookery course on BBC two.
Since when nearly two million people have watched spellbound as she unravels the mysteries
of Indian cuisine.
There were letters, there were people calling in.
People getting so excited.
As I came in at immigration, they would say, “so what are you making today?”
To be able to do it yourself and have something tasty that nobody’s ever served to you before
was quite something in people's homes.
Whatever I was making that particular evening would be cooked by everybody all over England.
The day after I cooked a chicken with green coriander, they ran out of green coriander
in Manchester, I was told.
So there were reactions like that, that a whole city the following day everybody is
cooking that particular thing.
I am going to put in some ground spices.
The supermarkets started stocking the spices.
So as I kept cooking the nature of the spices and the fresh ingredients they stocked became
larger and larger and larger.
The people from South Asia had never seen themselves on television as themselves.
They'd been mocked, they'd seen in forms that they didn't always like but they'd never seen
themselves as they were ordinary, wonderful people and cooking absolutely gorgeous food.
They felt I was representing them.
I would wear wonderful Indian cottons that I really thought were stylish and beautiful
because I wanted to project an attractive India that had a sense of modernity.
There was a deep, deep recognition and satisfaction that they were now on television in some way.
I'm really proud of the programme we did at that time.
I think we think we aimed it for people who had never watched an Indian programme before
and I think they reacted very well to it.
What I started has not died, that's the wonderful thing.
It's been picked up by other people and it'll have a life forever now.