’s life in food stemmed from resistance rather than attraction. The lure of cooking, she says, hasn’t always been clear-cut. When the acclaimed British-Indian chef was growing up in London, her mother, Santosh, discouraged her from culinary pursuits. Eight bestselling cookbooks later, she defied these plans.
“Growing up as an Indian girl of this generation, my mother wasn’t really keen for me to spend too much time in the kitchen – her mother had done it and all her sisters had done it,” she tells SBS Food. “She said, 'go get an education, you can do anything you want – do your homework, go play outside!' In my family, we had three kids, but I was always the one who helped in the kitchen. My father was the real gourmet in the family and him and I would seek out really wonderful experiences,” she says and laughs. “The others were like ‘whatever.’”
Anand’s parents emigrated from to London before she was born. The family, who made regular trips back to India, relocated to Switzerland for her father’s job when she was four.
Good food, she says, was a fixture of her upbringing. , those crisp, triangle-shaped parcels were often savoured during tea time. “It was one of the first few dishes I learned to make with my mother,” she says. Anand also enjoyed meatballs, or , quintessential Indian comfort food that shares DNA with versions found in Turkey and Lebanon. For Anand, this is part of the patchwork of Indian food culture.
"Proper Punjabi samosas" are part of the cookbook author's repertoire. Source: Anjum’s Australian Spice Stories
“There are completely different foods in the north and the south – and then all the influences we’ve had with the Moghuls, Chinese immigrants, the Berbers [the ], the British coming to Calcutta,” says Anand, whose latest cookbook, 2017’s , focuses on the pleasures of regional Indian cooking. “We have this wonderful culinary-quilt heritage that we’ve made our own.”
Her mother’s black pepper chicken curry – a dish popular in South India – was a childhood favourite.
“We had cumin chicken curry, we had regular chicken curry and we had the black pepper one and for me, it had a little bit of elegance, a bit of mystique to it,” she says. “I used to ask her, ‘how do you make it?’ 15 years later, she called me and asked, ‘how do you make that black pepper chicken?’ That’s why cooking is so wonderful. It brings people together, it keeps people together. It’s funny how it goes full circle.”
Anand studied European business administration but started her food career working in kitchens in New York and Los Angeles. “While I was doing all that, I was writing my mum’s recipes down,” she says. “In London, I would call people over to eat and I’d make them with potatoes and they would say ‘where are the curries?’”
Anjum Anand is the author of eight bestselling cookbooks. Source: Anjum Anand
Her first cookbook, published in 2003, challenged cultural misconceptions that Indian food is unhealthy. “I had a bee in my bonnet about the misrepresentation of Indian food,” she says. “That was the beginning of my career.”
We have this wonderful culinary-quilt heritage that we’ve made our own.
Since then, she’s been on a mission to prove that cooking Indian food doesn’t need to be labour-intensive or reserved for a special occasion. In 2011, she launched . The wildly popular range of cooking kits combines fresh spices and sauces, the foundation of dishes like , fiery Goan curry and Southern pepper curry. It’s part of her larger plan to democratise Indian cooking.
“I want Indian food to come back to the domestic kitchen outside of India,” she smiles. “[For my first book], my publishers wrote on my blurb that I want to make cooking Indian food at home as common as a stir-fry. When you love something so much and you are so passionate about it – you naturally want to start exploring it for yourself and others.”
Anjum Anand's Bombay potatoes Source: Emma Lee
Mum's black pepper chicken
“My mother taught me many recipes, but the one I wheel out the most is her black pepper chicken. It is the dish that everyone always craved and wanted when they came over – both her friends and mine.”
Serves 2-4
Ingredients
● 10 g ginger paste
● 30 g garlic paste
● 1 tsp garam masala powder
● 1 chicken stock cube, dissolved in 3 tbsp hot water
● 1 kg skinned chicken joints
● 3 tbsp vegetable oil
● 1 small chopped onion
● Whole green chillies (to taste)
● 5 cm piece of ginger, finely shredded
● Good pinch of salt
● 1 tbsp coriander powder
● 1 tbsp coarsely ground black pepper
● Lemon juice, to taste
● Coriander, chopped and to taste
Method
- To make the chicken marinade, combine the ginger paste, garlic paste, garam masala and chicken stock. Coat the chicken in the marinade and refrigerate for at least an hour. Set aside.
- Heat oil in a saucepan. Add chopped onion with whole green chillies and fry until golden brown.
- Add finely shredded ginger, chicken, salt, coriander powder and coarsely ground black pepper.
- Brown the chicken in the pan, add 200 ml water and simmer gently until done.
- Turn the heat up and cook off the excess liquid in the pan, while stirring the chicken so there is 100-150 ml of delicious peppery juices left.
- Stir in lemon juice to taste. Add lots of coriander and serve.
