50 years on, Madhur Jaffrey's Indian cookbook is useful metric for America

The US has a taste for curries but not as much as it should, says Pew study

Photo by Taylor Kiser on Unsplash

As Madhur Jaffrey’s book, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, marks its 50th year, it has become a useful metric of Indian cuisine in America.

The time elapsed between publication of the signature cookbook gives us some sense of how much has changed for Indian cuisine in America as well as how much remains to do.

As Aimee Levitt recently pointed out in Eater, Ms Jaffrey’s 1973 book “wasn’t the first Indian cookbook in this country (the US), but it was the one that caught on”. Unsurprisingly, Knopf will release a special 50th-anniversary edition with an introduction by Yotam Ottolenghi.

It will be a moment of celebration, as well it might, though a recent Pew Research Center study found that Indian and Filipino restaurants are two of the most underrepresented cuisines when compared to their respective population sizes in the US.

Even so, Ms Jaffrey’s accomplishment was to go to a place few US-based writers had properly before. Indian food in the early 1970s wa…