A cook's childhood in India

Madhur Jaffrey's elegant hands lift the teapot lid to check on the brew, her black bangs dipping over dark eyes. "I don't know why I'm waiting," she says, and surmises that the tea was already brewed in the kitchen. "It was nice that they heated the milk for me, though."

The actress and cookbook writer, looking a little like a slender child perched on a stool at Eastern Standard in Kenmore Square, has an actor's way of moving and speaking precisely.

Her latest book, "Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India" is just out . She's a lyrical writer, but fans knew that already from "Invitation to Indian Cooking" and "Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking." She's also been in numerous films and BBC series, and stars in "Hiding Divla," an independent film about an Indian family in New Jersey dealing with bipolar disease not yet released. It all adds up to an astounding career.

Still, for a woman who has long been in the public eye, she's sensitive about her family's privacy. "It's hard enough exposing yourself," she says, and she didn't want to hurt family members. "They just don't like being in a book. It's a privacy thing." For years she resisted writing about her childhood.

Jaffrey, who is in her early 70s, grew up on the outskirts of New Delhi in a huge extended family presided over by her grandfather. Meals were communal affairs with 30 or more at the table. Outings, too, were communal: picnics that involved moving mountains of food and family members layered like intricate cakes into two cars. Long days swimming and playing with cousins. Lining up as their grandfather dipped his finger into his Scotch to let each child have a taste. "These things were enjoyable," she says. "Growing up in a family like that I assumed everyone lived the way we did."

When she started writing, she worried about remembering her girlhood, she says, but "food I do remember." She writes of phulkas (fluffed whole-wheat flatbreads), goat curries, lamb with spinach, and daulat ki chaat, a frothy drink of rich milk kissed by morning dew and delivered by a mysterious "Lady in White." Her family, she writes, was "a hybrid: It was Hindu by origin but heavily veneered with Muslim culture and English education." So the men of the family might eat Muslim-style kebabs, and the women ate Hindu-style potatoes with ginger and summer squashes with tomato and cumin.

There were many servants. Still, Jaffrey's grandmother, her mother, and aunts directed and did much of the cooking. The result was "very homey dishes that I think of as comfort food," Jaffrey says.

Jaffrey lives in New York with her husband, Sanford Allen, a violinist who has retired from the New York Philharmonic and is active in chamber groups. One daughter, Sakina, is an actress. Another daughter, Zia, is a writer, and a third, Meera, a schoolteacher. All the family cooks, Jaffrey says, even her three grandchildren. Her 14-year-old grandson just mastered rack of lamb en croute, she says proudly, and the two younger ones clamor to cook with her when they visit. Indian restaurants rarely interest her, she says. "Nobody can reproduce home cooking."

She returns to India once a year -- "I need my India fix" -- to visit relatives and shop. "You eat in home after home," she says. If she has time, she has clothes made there with fabrics she buys -- she shows off a dark tunic woven with green and silver metallic threads.

She writes cookbooks to capture the food from home. "The whole point of my books is: 'You can cook as well as I can,' " she says. She suggests that neophytes pick one recipe and get only the spices for that dish. When they master that, then go on to another.

When she entertains at home, she serves several courses. There is always meat, and sometimes fish as well, a bread or starch, three or four vegetables, plus chutneys and yogurt. Dessert might be a steamed pudding -- this comes from her British-influenced background -- or fruit. "When we had fruit at home, my mother or her sisters would peel the fruit for the whole table," she says.

In the book, she writes about partition and the formation of Pakistan after India won independence from Britain in 1947. "I try to give a sense of what it was like, how the city changed completely." Her own story during the turmoil is wistful; her multicultural school life mingling Muslim and Hindu friends was torn asunder. "Most of our teenage friendships withered and died as soon as talk of partition began," she writes. "It was as if two icy hands had descended and split our class into two, Muslims on one side, fully armed with appropriate arguments, demanding a partition of the country, and Hindus on the other . . . saying 'Never.' " Her Muslim friends left for Pakistan without farewells; she writes about goat cooked with potatoes, cinammon, and cloves, and other dishes they shared. It's this sense of culture mixed with reminiscences of food and family that make her book so appealing.

The experience of partition reinforced her belief in openness to other cultures. Right now she's planning a trip to Sri Lanka and the Maldives for magazine articles. "Sri Lankan food is marvelous," she says, her eyes gleaming, "a wonderful melange of South India and Southeast Asia." And the Maldives, a string of atolls, has expensive resorts with chefs from Australia and elsewhere practicing a fusion cuisine. "There's so much of the world I don't know," she says. She uses food as her entry point. "Every time you go somewhere you learn so much," she says.

She climbs down from the stool and says a last good bye. She's ready to explore the world.