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The Food Programme: Madhur Jaffrey: A Legacy

15/05/2022

Madhur Jaffrey: A Legacy

BBC Radio 4 - The Food Programme, Madhur Jaffrey: A Legacy

Sheila Dillon hears how Madhur 'paved the way' in food for women of Indian heritage.

Sheila Dillon hears how Madhur Jaffrey 'paved the way' in food for women of Indian heritage. Including interviews with Asma Khan, Chetna Makan and Romy Gill.

40 years ago the BBC broadcast a new TV cooking series called "Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking". It was a first, and showed audiences that Indian food did not rely on curry powder, and that dishes were different depending on what region of India they originated. But that's not all, the series and Madhur Jaffrey's subsequent books (she has written more than 30) had another effect; it made her a model for two generations of women with roots in India.  

Today Sheila Dillon meets some of those prominent and hugely successful female chefs, restaurateurs, food writers and stylists who are currently working in the UK, to find out about their lives, and what they make of Madhur Jaffrey's legacy.  

Asma Khan rose to fame when she was chosen as the first British chef to star in the Netflix series, Chef’s Table. She runs her London restaurant, Darjeeling Express, with an all-female staff. 

Chetna Makan worked as a fashion designer in India before moving to the UK. She switched careers after making it to the semi-finals of the Great British Bake Off in 2014. She is now the author of 5 cookery books, and has more than 210,000 subscribers on YouTube. 

Ravinder Bhogal is a chef, food writer and author of two books. She also runs the London restaurant, Jikoni, which she describes as being “proudly inauthentic”.    

Romy Gill is a chef, broadcaster and food writer, and was one of the first Asian women in the UK to own her own restaurant. 

Rukmini Iyer is a food stylist and writer and the author of the bestselling "Roasting Tin" series of books. 

Sejal Sukhadwala is a London food writer. Her first book "The Philosophy of Curry" has just been published. 

Presented by Sheila Dillon
Produced in Bristol by Natalie Donovan

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