CLIMBING THE MANGO TREES(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Whether acclaimed food writer Madhur Jaffrey was climbing the
mango trees in her grandparents’ orchard in Delhi or picnicking in
the Himalayan foothills on meatballs stuffed with raisins and mint,
tucked into freshly baked spiced pooris, today these childhood
pleasures evoke for her the tastes and textures of growing
up.
　　This memoir is both an enormously appealing account of an unusual
childhood and a testament to the power of food to prompt memory,
vividly bringing to life a lost time and place. Included here are
recipes for more than thirty delicious dishes that are recovered
from Jaffrey’s childhood.

　　Regarded by many as the world authority on Indian food,
Madhur Jaffrey is an award-winning actress and best-selling
cookbook author. Her classic first book, An Invitation to Indian
Cooking, was published by Knopf in 1973, and she has been the
host of a series, “Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery,” for BBC
television. She has appeared in more than 20 films, including
Merchant Ivory’s Heat and Dust, and written more than 15
books. She won James Beard Awards in 1982, 1994, 2000, 2002, and
2004. She lives in New York City.

　　“Wistful, funny and tremendously satisfying. . . . Jaffrey’s
taste memories sparkle with enthusiasm, and her talent for
conveying them makes the book relentlessly appetizing.”
　　—The New York Times Book Review
　　“Do not attempt to read [this] mouth-wateringly evocative memoir
on an empty stomach. . . . A delicious tribute to a deeply rooted,
multicultural upbringing.”
　　—Newsday
　　“A sharp observer with a pleasing eye for sensual detail, Jaffrey
weaves a richly textured story in which she effortlessly mingles
quotidian drams with historic events.”
　　—People Magazine
　　”Her story reads like a novel and evokes images worthy of a
Merchant-Ivoryproduction. You can practically taste sun warmed
mangoes plucked from the tree, the barley-sugar candy that holds a
hallowed place in the author’s memory.”
　　—The Seattle Times

　　Ground Lamb with Peas (Keema Matar)
　　Serves 4–6
　　I cannot imagine our picnics or train rides in India without this
dish. For my grandchildren, growing up in America, it is an
all-time favorite. Sometimes we eat it with pooris, the deep-fried
puffed breads, as we did so often in India, and sometimes with
rice. When cooking for the children, I leave out all the chilies,
whether the powdered red kind or the fresh green variety. My
parents did the same for us when we were growing up.
　　I use low-fat yogurt, but you may use whole-milk yogurt if you
prefer.
　　1 cup plain yogurt
　　1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
　　1 teaspoon ground cumin
　　1 tablespoon ground coriander
　　1 1/4 teaspoons salt
　　One 2-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and grated to a pulp
　　3 good-sized cloves garlic, peeled and crushed to a pulp
　　2 pounds ground lamb
　　4 tablespoons peanut or olive oil
　　2 sticks cinnamon, about 2 inches each in length
　　4 whole cardamom pods
　　2 bay leaves
　　1 medium onion, peeled and finely chopped
　　1/2 cup puréed tomatoes (also labeled strained tomatoes or
passata)
　　1 1/2 cups fresh (or frozen and defrosted) peas
　　3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh cilantro
　　1–2 finely chopped fresh bird’s eye or cayenne-type green
chiles
　　1 teaspoon garam masala (see recipe below)
　　Put the yogurt in a bowl and whisk lightly until smooth and
creamy. Add the turmeric, cayenne, cumin, coriander, salt, ginger,
and garlic. Mix until well blended.
　　Put the lamb into a large bowl. Pour the yogurt mixture over the
top and mix (I use my hands) until thoroughly blended. There should
not be any pools of yogurt left.
　　Pour the oil into a large (preferably nonstick) sauté pan and set
over medium-high heat. When it is hot, put in the cinnamon,
cardamom, and bay leaves. Stir once or twice, and then add the
onion. Stir and fry about 5 minutes, or until the onion pieces are
reddish brown.
　　Add all the meat. Stir and cook, breaking up the meat until no
lumps and no pinkness are left, about 5 minutes.
　　Add the tomato purée and stir it in. Bring to a simmer. Cover,
turn the heat to medium-low, and cook for 30 minutes, stirring
every 6–7 minutes and making sure there is enough liquid so the
lamb does not stick to the bottom. Uncover. Most of the liquid
should have evaporated by this time. Stir and fry the meat for the
next 5 minutes, removing and discarding the cinnamon sticks,
cardamom pods, and bay leaves. After 5 minutes, spoon out as much
of the fat as you can and discard it. Now put in the peas,
cilantro, green chilies (if desired), garam masala, and 6
tablespoons water. Mix, cover and cook on low heat another 6–7
minutes, or until tender.
　　Garam Masala
　　Makes about 3 tablespoons
　　An aromatic spice mixture made with the more expensive “warming”
spices, this is generally, though not always, used towards the end
of a cooking period to add a rich but still delicate whiff of
elegance. It may be bought, already prepared, in spice stores, but
generally has too many filler spices such as cumin and coriander
and not enough of the more expensive cardamom and cinnamon. Indian
grocers sell cardamom seeds already removed from their pods.
Nutmegs are soft and may be broken by tapping with a hammer. Here
is a family recipe.
　　1 tablespoon cardamom seeds
　　1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
　　1 teaspoon whole black cumin seeds
　　1 teaspoon whole cloves
　　About 2/3 of a nutmeg
　　One 2-inch stick of cinnnamon, broken up into small pieces
　　Put all the spices into the container of a spice grinder or clean
coffee grinder and grind as finely as possible. Store in a tightly
lidded jar, away from sunlight. It will keep for several
months.
　　ONE
　　The orchard site had housed our family homestead only since the
early decades of the twentieth century. My family actually came
from the walled city, often called Old Delhi, just to the south,
built by the Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan in the seventeenth century.
My family referred to it simply as Shahar, or the City.
　　There are many Delhis, as we were to study in school, all built
either alongside each other or wholly or partly on top of each
other, often reusing building materials knocked down in bloody
efforts at domination. Our own original family home was in
Chailpuri, in the narrow lanes of the Old City. It had as its
carefully chosen foundation sturdy stones “borrowed” from the walls
of Ferozshah Kotla, the fourteenth-century fortress and palace of a
fourteenth- century emperor in a fourteenth-century Delhi.
　　Starting with the ancient Vedic city of Indraprastha, which
flourished in the fifteenth century B.C., a succession of Delhis
was built, first by generations of Hindu rajas, only to be followed
in A.D. 1193 by a roll call of Muslim dynasties: Ghori, Ghaznavi,
Qutubshahi, Khilji, Tughlak, Lodhi, and Moghul. They seemed to
trust the dubious comfort of walled cities, and their leaders chose
to name Delhi, again and again, after themselves. This ended, at
least from the point of view of my childhood, with the British
version, sans walls, New Delhi, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and
built in the ruin- filled wilderness south of the Old City
walls.
　　The Moghul capital, Shahjahanabad, or the Old City or the City,
or Shahar, was where the written history of my family began. We
were only blessed with our paternal side of it. My mother’s side
either kept few records or humbly kept its accomplishments under
wraps. This written history, bound in red, was kept in my
grandfather’s home office.
　　When my grandfather—Babaji, as we called him—decided to move out
of the City to the orchard estate, he was already a very successful
barrister. His new house, the one in which I was born, was a brick-
and-plaster version of a multi-roomed, grand Moghul tent with bits
of British fortress and Greco-Roman classicism thrown in to hint
vaguely at grandeur. The road it was built on was named after my
grandfather, Raj Narain Road (with the patriotic Hindification of
names that followed Independence, it is now Raj Narain Marg), and
had the number 7 on its front gate. From the time I can remember,
we always referred to that house as Number 7, as in “I’m going to
Number 7,” or “You know that big tamarind tree in Number 7. . .
.”
　　Not wishing to waste money, and full of the brio of someone
recently “England-returned” (he had been studying law in London),
he designed it all himself. As the family story goes, it was at
this time that the British had decided to move their capital from
Calcutta to Delhi, and Lutyens was in the process of building the
new capital, to be named New Delhi. Lutyens asked my grandfather to
pick any piece of land in New Delhi and build on it—Lutyens might
have designed the house himself had my grandfather asked—but my
grandfather dismissed the whole idea, saying, “Who wants to live in
that jungle?” Properties in “that jungle” are now worth as much as
those in central London and midtown Manhattan.
　　Years later, having proceeded beyond my three score and ten
years, I was awarded an honorary CBE (Commander of the British
Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II in Washington, D.C., another city
designed by Lutyens, in a house also designed by Lutyens, the
British ambassador’s residence. As I stared at my reflection there
in a pair of dark Lutyens mirrors, dotted with glass rosettes, I
couldn’t help thinking that my life might have come full-circle. I
could have been born in a Lutyens house and received a grand
recognition of my life in a Lutyens house. But I was not destined
for such easy symmetry, for easy anything.
　　Babaji’s whitewashed house consisted of a central “gallery”—a
hall, really—leading to five very large rooms with fireplaces. One
of these was the drawing room, and the others served as bedrooms,
one to a family. Running along the front and back of the house were
two long verandas lined with semi-classical, semi–Greco-Roman
pillars. The back, east-facing veranda looked out on the Yamuna
River, or, as we called it with great familiarity, the Jumna River.
It was here that so many of us, as infants, were rubbed with oil
and left to absorb the morning sun. Because the land must have
sloped down to the water, this veranda was one floor up, built over
a very large, partially underground, damp, always cool cellar or
taikhana. My grandfather used to make wine here from grapes he
imported from Afghanistan, but that must have been before I was
born.
　　The front, west veranda faced the gardens, which had incorporated
the remnants of the old orchard and now included a winding drive to
the front gate. The front and back verandas ended in rooms at each
corner of the house, the front ones being shaped somewhat like
turrets. The functions of these corner rooms changed over the
years, but one of them at the back, facing east and south, always
remained my grandmother’s—and the family’s—chapel-like, Pooja ka
Kamra or Prayer Room. On top of the house were two levels of flat
roofs, the one in the center being higher, and both edged with a
battlement-like balustrade.
　　But the main house was not large enough to fit the only army
Babji was to see, a growing army of spirited grandchildren produced
by his eight children. Some of these progeny lived at Number 7 all
the time, and some came and went. Babaji firmly believed in the
joint-family system, with himself presiding as the head of his
brood, a system that…