Catalogue

Record Details

Catalogue Search



Climbing the mango trees a memoir of a childhood in India  Cover Image E-book E-book

Climbing the mango trees [electronic resource] : a memoir of a childhood in India / Madhur Jaffrey.

Summary:

Actress-writer Jaffrey gives us a memoir of her childhood in Delhi in an age and a society that has since disappeared. Madhur (meaning sweet as honey) grew up in a large family compound where her grandfather often presided over dinners with forty or more members of his extended family. Picnicking in the Himalayan foothills on meatballs stuffed with raisins and mint and tucked into freshly baked pooris; sampling the lunch boxes of Muslim friends; sneaking tastes of exotic street fare--such memories flavor Jaffrey's story. Independent, sensitive, and 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. This is both an account of an unusual childhood and a testament to the power of food to evoke memory. Plus a secret ingredient: more than thirty family recipes.--From publisher description.

Record details

  • ISBN: 9780307517692 (electronic bk. : Adobe Digital Editions)
  • ISBN: 0307517691 (electronic bk. : Adobe Digital Editions)
  • Physical Description: 1 online resource (x, 297 p.) : ill.
  • Edition: 1st American ed.
  • Publisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Content descriptions

General Note:
Description based on print version record.
Formatted Contents Note:
Delhi-Old and New -- Sir Edwin Lutyens and the House That Never Was -- Grandfather, "Babaji" -- Number 7 -- The Lady in White -- The Kite -- Summer Lunch -- The Red Book -- The Story of My Ancestors -- Muslim Influence -- British Rule -- The Record-Keeper -- Mutiny of 1857 -- The Reward -- The Freedom of Kanpur -- My Mother and Father -- A Fairy-Tale Marriage -- A Desire to Excel -- Choosing a School -- A Milky Nation: The Milk Beauty Secret and Milk for Breakfast -- Our Morning Rituals -- The Magic Garden -- Summer Holiday -- Baby Sister -- Starting School and Learning English -- The Toffee Man -- The Quest for Barley Sugar -- My Perfect Sisters -- Fasting for My Father -- Lighting Up for Diwali -- An Opulent Dining Room -- Chewing the Bones -- Bookworms -- A Role Model -- My Caring, Reticent Sister -- The Useful Club -- The Death of a Cousin -- Divided Loyalties -- Preparing for War -- Film Buffs -- The Nazi Connection -- Wolfie and the Gray Horse -- The End of the Kanpur Idyll -- Spellbinding Shibbudada -- Two Tragic Marriages -- Sadness and a Conspiracy of Silence -- My Gang -- Fishing, Shooting, and Swimming -- The Watermelon Fields -- Ear-Piercing Antiseptic -- The Drawing Room -- Winter Evenings: Family, Friends, Lemonade, Nuts, and Pakoris -- Dining at the Long Tables -- Family Picnics in Delhi -- The Art of Getting Thirty People into Two Cars -- Cinema Trips -- Story Time -- Summer Holidays in the Hills -- The Great Exodus -- Grandmother's Magic Potion -- Mountain Picnics -- The Taste of Ecstasy -- A New School -- Classmates in Burqas -- Hindi or Urdu: A Dreadful Choice -- A Lethally Sharp Pencil -- Shibbudada's Favorites -- Teatime Tension -- A Dream House in Daurala -- The Sugarcane Fields -- Sweets Galore in the Sugar Factory -- Visiting the Old City -- The Lane of Fried Breads -- Monsoon Mushrooms -- Learning to Swim and Dance -- A Haven for Musicians -- Temple Dancers and Tap-Dancers -- Dressing as Milkmaids -- An Unhappy Teenager -- The Drama of the Monsoons -- Shibbudada's Quiet Cruelty -- The Spring Festival of Colors -- Chicken Pox -- Soup-Toast and Sewing -- A Fancy-Dress Party -- Learning to Fly -- School Days in Summer -- Mrs. McKelvie -- Discovering Drama -- Fearless Amina -- Art Appreciation -- The Sisters Return -- A Taste of the Future -- Mother's Shawls -- Kamal's Illness -- The Muslim Twins -- Sudha's Vegetarian Delights -- Punjabi Promila -- Our Shared Lunchtime Feasts -- Contacting the Spirit World -- The Icy Hands of Partition -- Mahatma Gandhi -- Spinning for India -- Independence Day and the Bloody Aftermath -- Punjabi Influences -- Food with New Attitude -- Bazaar and Tandoori Foods -- A Taste of Spam -- Sunday Lunchtimes -- The Looming Banyan Tree -- New School Friends and Fresh Tastes -- Learning to Love Hindi -- Two Types of Indians -- Hated Cookery Lessons -- Divine Potatoes -- Exam Season -- Brain Food -- The Honey Seller -- Sweetening the Mouth -- First Jobs and First Loves -- Ballroom Dancing -- Dressing for the Dinner Dance -- Future Planning -- The Radio Station -- The Last Large Picnic -- Wildflower Hall and an Encounter with the Police -- Kamal's Journey -- Shibbudada Interferes Again -- Cookery Exam -- A Joint Family in New York -- Grandfather's Decline -- A Riverside Cremation -- Kamal's Return -- A Gift of Coca-Cola -- Sailing to a New Life -- Mingling the Flavors of the Past and the Future -- Family Recipes 245.
Subject: Jaffrey, Madhur, 1933- > Childhood and youth.
Women cooks > India > Biography.
Cooking, Indic.
Genre: Electronic books.

Electronic resources


  • Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2006 October #1
    Actress and consummate authority on the foods of India, Jaffrey reflects on her earliest memories in this autobiography. Steeped in Hindu culture and learning, she grew up within an extended well-to-do Delhi family that expected the best of each. Starting with her grandmother's placing honey on her tongue shortly after birth, Jaffrey's life began to arrange itself around all that food represents in Hindu life. Some of her most touching and distressing scenes come with the advent of India's independence and its partition. Jaffrey's friends and schoolmates had from the outset included both Hindu and Muslim, but religious and political strife soon sundered all relations. On the culinary front, Hindu refugees from the subcontinent's northwest regions brought tandoori cooking to Delhi and ultimately made it an integral part of the national cuisine. In an appendix, Jaffrey records recipes for dozens of dishes that figure in her memoir. ((Reviewed October 1, 2006)) Copyright 2006 Booklist Reviews.
  • Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2006 July #2
    A beloved food writer recalls her youth through the lens of cuisine.Jaffrey (Market Days, 1995, etc.) grew up in India during the 1930s and '40s, the fifth child of two doting, well-heeled parents. Her family was Hindu, but embraced certain touches of Muslim culture: The women wore both the loose culottes favored by Muslims and long, traditional Hindu skirts; at school, Jaffrey studied alongside both Muslim and Hindu children. Her story has no clear narrative arc and no tension that requires resolution, but the meandering is pleasant. Almost every vignette includes a description of food. When she was born, her grandmother spelled out the word Om in honey on her tongue, and Jaffrey's first name translates to "Sweet as Honey." Summer afternoon thirsts were slaked with fresh lemonade or a mixture of fruit syrup and water. Monsoon season brought its own sweet treats of chilled mango juice and "pretzel-shaped jabelis" dipped in milk. A long bout of chicken pox was made bearable by her grandmother's chutney. Even Partition had culinary consequences: Hindus who headed into India from what became West Pakistan introduced Delhi to Punjabi food, including the terrific paneer dishes and tasty tandoori specialties that are now staples of Indian restaurants. Punjabis also loved dairy products; they made the richest yogurt, and the creamiest lassi, a cool yogurt beverage. As an adult, Jaffrey went to college and then moved to England to study drama. Not until she landed in London did she really begin to appreciate her mother's cooking. She wrote home, begging for instruction on preparing the delicacies of her youth, and soon airmail letters thick with recipes began to arrive. Fifty pages of those recipes round out the text.Readers will lap up this mouthwatering memoir and hungrily await a sequel.First printing of 40,000 Copyright Kirkus 2006 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.
  • Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2006 June #1
    An actress and best-selling cookbook author recalls the India of her youth. With a six-city tour. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
  • Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2006 November #2

    Readers will be surprised to learn in this culinary memoir that Jaffrey (An Invitation to Indian Cooking ), one of the best-known writers on Indian cuisine, actually failed home economics. Although she later learned to prepare the traditional Indian food of her childhood, her early culinary education was primarily concerned with outdated recipes from British colonial days. What is not surprising is that Jaffrey, a descendant of a long line of record-keeping Kayastha Hindus, is a gifted and generous writer. She shares treasured recollections of how her close-knit family lived in Delhi, conveying the safety and warmth of the presence of many siblings and cousins, the love of food and learning, and the unease and disturbance of the partition of India and Pakistan. Thirty-seven photographs of the author and her family are scattered throughout. There are more than 30 family recipes, including Phulkas (a kind of Indian flatbread), Mung Bean Fritters, and Ground Lamb Samosas, all written in Jaffrey's easy style. Highly recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/06.]—Rosemarie Lewis, Broward Cty. P.L., Ft. Lauderdale, FL

    [Page 92]. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
  • Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2006 August #2

    The celebrated actress and author of several books on Indian cooking turns her attention to her own childhood in Delhi and Kampur. Born in 1933 as one of six children of a prosperous businessman, Jaffrey grew up as part of a huge "joint family" of aunts, uncles and cousins—often 40 at dinner—under the benign but strict thumb of Babaji, her grandfather and imperious family patriarch. It was a privileged and cosmopolitan family, influenced by Hindu, Muslim and British traditions, and though these were not easy years in India, a British ally in WWII and soon to go though the agony of partition (the separation and formation of Muslim Pakistan), Jaffrey's graceful prose and sure powers of description paint a vivid landscape of an almost enchanted childhood. Her family and friends, the bittersweet sorrows of puberty, the sensual sounds and smells of the monsoon rain, all are remembered with love and care, but nowhere is her writing more evocative than when she details the food of her childhood, which she does often and at length. Upon finishing this splendid memoir, the reader will delight in the 30 "family-style" recipes included as lagniappe at the end. Photos. (Oct. 11)

    [Page 193]. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Additional Resources