Having said this, I found myself frustrated because this book was not introspective enough for me. These works are hard acts to follow for any memoir or book about an Indian family story. I am not sure what happened for me here.I love memoirs, and I love Madhur Jaffrey, so what could go wrong?įirst of all, I strongly suspect that I would have liked this more had it not come on the heels of two very excellent book club reads, Jeanette Walls "The Glass Castle" and Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Namesake". A big rocket of light into the sky and then "pffffffszzzzz"-a quiet, empty poof.
It showed such promise in the onset, but in the end, felt like one of those 4th of July firecrackers that is just a dud. I don't regret reading it, but I also don't regret the fact that this is a book that will go back to the library instead of on my bookshelf at home. (Which are all DELICIOUS, by the way.) I had seen some excellent reviews of this memoir on amazon, and confidently suggested it to my book club when I saw it on a list of available books in our library's book club kits. She has come to feel very much of a household presence for me, and I have felt intimately acquainted with her for years through cooking and eating her family's recipes. I have been a fan for years, ever since I picked up one of her cookbooks while living in London. And, at the end, this treasure of a book contains a secret ingredient-more than thirty family recipes recovered from Madhur's childhood, which she now shares with us.įor fans of Madhur Jaffrey's cookbooks, this memoir will be, well. "Climbing the Mango Trees" is both an enormously appealing account of an unusual childhood and a testament to the power of food to evoke memory. Independent, sensitive, and ever curious, as a young girl she loved uncovering her family's many-layered history, and she was deeply affected by their personal trials and by the devastating consequences of Partition, which ripped their world apart.
Madhur (meaning "sweet as honey") Jaffrey grew up in a large family compound where her grandfather often presided over dinners at which forty or more members of his extended family would savor together the wonderfully flavorful dishes that were forever imprinted on Madhur's palate.Ĭlimbing mango trees in the orchard, armed with a mixture of salt, pepper, ground chilies, and roasted cumin picnicking in the Himalayan foothills on meatballs stuffed with raisins and mint and tucked into freshly fried "poori"s sampling the heady flavors in the lunch boxes of Muslim friends sneaking tastes of exotic street fare-these are the food memories Madhur Jaffrey draws on as a way of telling her story. Today's most highly regarded writer on Indian food gives us an enchanting memoir of her childhood in Delhi in an age and a society that has since disappeared.
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