The original spice girl

A GOLDEN autumn afternoon in New York and friends call to say that we have a dinner reservation at "one of the smartest restaurants in town", some claim given the plethora of posh places in Manhattan. But this spot is also one of the best Indian restaurants outside India, according to the Zagat Survey, America's answer to the Michelin Guide.

We walk into the Upper East Side eatery, Dawat, to discover a shrine to Madhur Jaffrey, celebrated actress and guru of Indian cuisine; the woman I am to interview later in the week. Glossy photographs of the Broadway star - most recently seen in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bollywood musical Bombay Dreams, although she insists she's no singer - are everywhere. Copies of her best-selling cookery books are on display and the menu is a paean of praise to "our esteemed culinary adviser".

"Madhur Jaffrey recommends," reads the tasting menu of dishes created by her. "Look for the symbol identifying recipes devised by the great actress and world-famous food writer." So we order a dozen delicacies bearing the Jaffrey imprimatur.

Zagat was not exaggerating - the zingy tandoori grilled vegetables, my foodie friends agree, are divine. As for the potato cakes with red chutney, the spicy shrimps, the curried chicken, the thinly sliced lamb and the mustard greens ... the flavours are delicate yet incredibly intense; then a hot firework explodes in your mouth, tears well in your eyes and your tastebuds sing and dance. "This is haute cuisine Indian food," we sigh blissfully as we settle a very large bill.

Jaffrey purrs with pleasure when I tell her about this memorable meal at the restaurant where she has been food consultant since it opened 14 years ago. Of course, she says, with a grimace, those images of her plastered around Dawat are flattering, but quite old.

"Indeed, I'm quite old myself now," says the serenely elegant septuagenarian, who could effortlessly pass for fiftysomething with her unlined aquiline features, imperious cheekbones, sloe-black eyes and immaculately groomed hair the colour of bitter chocolate with just a hint of henna.

She has no beauty tips to offer those wishing to grow old gracefully. "There's nothing remotely graceful about me," she says with a loud, dismissive laugh. If she looks younger than she is, it's because she remains enthusiastic about life. "If you are happy with your work it gives you energy. It's all in the mind. Ageing is a process and you must accept it. So I wake up with puffy eyes. At my age, there's nothing I can do about it, although I work hard at staying slim and exercise as often as I can. With all this food around, the weight could just pile on.

"I'm an actress who cooks, not a cook who acts, so of course I care about how I look, but I'm a grandmother now, with three daughters and three grandchildren, and I play grandmothers all the time nowadays anyway. In my next life, though, I'm going to be tall, blonde and a singer ... When I was young and at my best-looking I just didn't get the parts. But the older I get, the more I work. In fact I've made three films already this year." They include a Canadian production, Partition, about the historic and most horrible period of her life, when she watched the country she loved being split in two in the name of independence. "It shaped me politically," she says. Her father took her, aged 13, the only one of his children to be among the millions of people to see the flags change.

"I've never forgotten the vision of Nehru and Lord Mountbatten, two handsome men in white in a horse-drawn carriage. Everyone threw their hats in the air." Then came the dark days of violence and rioting and the death of Gandhi, by whose peaceful precepts her family lived.

Madhur Jaffrey was born 72 years ago in Delhi. She was only minutes old when her grandmother welcomed her into the world by writing "Om" - "I am" in Sanskrit - on her tongue with her little finger dipped in honey. A month later, when the family priest came to draw up the baby's horoscope, he scribbled astrological symbols on a long scroll and announced that the child would be called Indira, or "Goddess of the Heavens". Her businessman father, Dadaji Bahadur, "who never paid religious functionaries the slightest bit of attention", firmly named his fifth child, and third daughter, Madhur, which means "sweet as honey". And so, she says: "I was left with honey on my tongue and in my deepest soul."

The former EastEnders actress and renowned broadcaster, recipient of an honorary CBE, stars as a therapist opposite Meryl Streep and Uma Thurman in the romantic comedy Prime, released this month. She is the first to admit, however, that the innocent Indian honey of infancy is now mixed with pungent Indian spices, the sour and bitter, the nutty and aromatic.

"I may have been born with honey on my tongue, but I was also born squirming against the status quo," she writes in her memoir, Climbing the Mango Trees, in which the myriad tastes, exotic scents and glowing colours of her childhood in India are so vividly conjured up that you can almost smell them. You can taste them, too, since the book contains 14 of her family's special recipes - the foods she grew up with - stuffed okra, koftas (meatball curry) and phulkas (crispy wheat breads, a cut above chapatis). Her Hindu childhood was privileged - the family was upper-middle-class and relatively wealthy - although she stresses that "there was an edge to this seemingly lovely life". The Bahadurs certainly knew their place - and a very agreeable place it was too. They were high caste Hindu intellectuals who believed ink flowed in their veins. Jaffrey's grandfather was a successful barrister who dined with Queen Victoria.

She was a difficult child, she admits, with one of her brilliant smiles. And the rebellious little girl grew up to become an even more difficult woman - a woman forever questioning and questing, intensely curious, someone who doesn't suffer fools gladly, and who doesn't always see the best in people. "Tell me how to do something and my hackles rise," she announces, adding that her inquisitive nature has led her to taste foods everywhere, such as dung grubs, civet, dog and even the semen of the deadly Japanese blowfish, the fugu. The grubs were foul and tasted of, well, dung, although the semen was delicious, like creamy caviare.

Convinced from an early age that there was a world elsewhere waiting to be discovered, she has lived most of her life in the West, hanging on to the important things from Indian culture, such as the food, and absorbing the best of the rest of the world. "In my teens, I was filled with desires and longings," she says. "There was a male hierarchy and I didn't like it."

She was as prickly as the okra she had helped the gardener pick when the family lived in Kanpur, where her father once managed a ghee (clarified butter) factory. That okra, when cooked with glutinous urad dal, sent seven-year-old Madhur into paroxysms of delight - she reckons she lost her sweet tooth at around four years of age. Wishing to emulate the passions of the grown-ups, she began to explore the hot and the sour.

One of her most cherished memories is of her grandparents' sprawling home in Delhi, where she was born. The house was set in an orchard of jujubes, mulberries, tamarinds and mangoes. Like a flock of hungry birds, the innumerable grandchildren - "it didn't occur to me that families came in sizes smaller than 30 people, swelling beatifically to a few thousand at the mere hint of a grand event" - would attack the mangoes while they were still sweet and sour. As the adults snored through the heat in rooms cooled with wetted, sweet-smelling vetiver curtains, the children would hang from the branches of the mango tree. Armed with a ground mixture of salt, pepper, red chillies and roasted cumin, they would slice the peeled fruit and dip it in the spices. "As our mouths tingled, we felt initiated into the world of the grown-ups," she says.

For Jaffrey, the spiced mango slice is her madeleine, a Proustian remembrance of times past. She begins her enchanting memoir by evoking this filmic scene. Such is the power of her "taste memory" that she insists she can still "hear" the honey on her baby tongue the way her second husband, the violinist Sanford Allen, to whom she has been married for 38 years, hears music when he reads it.

The way to Allen's heart was not through his stomach, though. He's an excellent cook in his own right, although he never attempts Indian food since his wife refuses to label her spice jars. They have three kitchens — two in their house in upstate New York, where she grows everything from kohlrabi to green chillies and maize. "We cook for each other and I think there's nothing like providing sustenance both physically and emotionally for someone you love," she says. Her first husband and the father of her three daughters, now in their forties ("they will kill me if you print their ages"), is the Indian actor Saeed Jaffrey, whose name she kept after their acrimonious divorce more than 40 years ago, because she had already made a name for herself as both an actress and a writer.

They married after she graduated from RADA, to which she won a scholarship in the 1950s and where she was a contemporary of Dame Diana Rigg and Sian Phillips. She could not boil the proverbial egg back then, but the food in London was so disgusting - she lived on chocolates and wine amid the Dickensian pea-soup fogs - that she wrote home begging for recipes. Her mother taught her to cook via airmail.

Her palate had already recorded "millions of flavours" in the meals cooked for the family by their servants, although her dainty, elegant mother supervised all the food preparation. "From cumin to ginger, all those tastes were in my head, waiting to be called into service," she says.

Those mangoes, for instance, she says, are remembered as "the taste of ecstasy, the ecstasy of our summers in the hills at Dalhousie" - a hill station named for a Scot and a former governor-general of India, the tenth Earl of Dalhousie.

If Jaffrey closes her eyes she can still taste the cool, nectarlike juice. So redolent are such memories that they have enabled her to revisit her childhood. "I didn't want to write this book," she reveals, carefully adjusting the long scarf on her tunic, which appears to have been dyed in spicy shades of mustard, saffron and cayenne pepper.

"I just didn't feel the need to expose my life and I worried I wouldn't be able to remember it all. Of course, my childhood was very warm and loving and I had the most wonderful parents who remained deeply in love with each other all their lives, despite the fact that we were surrounded by some questionable marriages. My uncle, for instance, hated his very plain wife - an arranged marriage. But my own girlhood had its edges, its prickly corners, and that's what gave me the incentive to write. I was so discontented as a child, always questioning the position of women in the household - everything was so free and yet it was so rigid. You belonged where you belonged and you didn't ask why. I wasn't quite like everyone else because I asked why."

Many members of her family still live in India. "In a way I envy them," she says. "They must have greater peace of mind than I do. But for me the quest goes on. It's endless. I'm off to Sri Lanka soon and I can't wait."

Climbing the Mango Trees ends with her at 17, busy falling in love, winning a handful of scholarships, then sailing off alone and breathless to taste a new life in London. "I thought I would go up to 21 in the book, but I couldn't; it was just far too painful. I couldn't write about my life after that age because it got messier and messier. My marriage broke up and it was very hard. I can't write about it, therefore I can't even begin to talk about it. Too many people are involved - and how do you write about the most intimate emotional things? I don't know how one does that and preserves one's sanity."

• Readers can order a copy of Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jaffrey for 17.99 (rrp 18.99) with free delivery in the UK. Send a cheque or PO made payable to the EFC Bookshop to Climbing the Mango Trees Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ or tel: [phone] with card details.

A family recipe

BIMLA'S CHICKEN CURRY

This recipe comes from Bimla, who married my cousin Shashi, Saran Bhua's son. The recipe is very like my mother's, only Bimla keeps the sauce thick and clinging to the chicken pieces. It is utterly delicious.

I buy a 31/4 lb/1.5kg organic chicken and get the butcher to skin it and cut it into small serving pieces. Legs should be separated into drumsticks and thighs, and each breast should be cut into two pieces.

Serves 4

• 3 medium onions (about 1lb/450g), peeled and coarsely chopped

• 20 medium cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped

• 3 inch/7.5cm fresh ginger, peeled and chopped

• 6 tablespoons olive or other vegetable oil

• 8 green cardamom pods

• 2 x 2 inch/5cm sticks cinnamon

• 8 cloves

• 14 whole peppercorns

• 1 teaspoon Kashmiri red chilli powder (or 1/2 teaspoon cayenne plus 1/2 teaspoon of a nice red paprika)

• 1 medium chicken, preferably organic, skinned and cut into small serving pieces, net weight about 2lb 10oz/1.25kg

• 11/2 cups (12fl oz/350ml) rich yoghurt

• 11/2 teaspoons salt or to taste

Put the onions into a blender. Add the garlic and ginger and blend until you have a smooth paste.

Put the oil in a large, heavy saut or frying pan set over a medium-high heat. When hot, put in the cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and peppercorns. Ten seconds later, add the onion paste and the Kashmiri chilli powder. Now stir-fry for about ten minutes, turning the heat down to medium, if necessary, until the paste has turned a rich golden brown.

Whenever it seems to stick, sprinkle in a little water and stir it in. Now add the chicken pieces, a few at a time, and stir them in. Again, sprinkle in some water if the sauce sticks to the bottom. When all the chicken has been added, begin to put in the yoghurt, a tablespoon at a time, and stir it in just as you did the water.

When the sauce sticks, add yoghurt and stir it in. Do this for about 10 to 12 minutes. When only 4fl oz/120ml of yogurt are left, put it all in and stir it around. Add the salt as well and stir to mix. Now cover, turn the heat to low and cook for ten minutes, stirring now and then.

Uncover and stir, making sure the sauce is clinging to the chicken.