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Anjum Anand is passionate about home-made Indian food. She tells Fiona Shield how the right spices can transform a dish to outshine any restaurant, and how an Indian diet can offer children, and adults, a healthy lifestyle
You have a degree in European Business, when did you first start cooking?
I never thought cooking was something I would do professionally, especially because I’d grown up with my mother and grandmother being in the kitchen, which was natural in Indian culture. So I thought I’d try a career in business, but found that I graduated and hated it. I didn’t like going to an office – it’s just not me – so I started thinking about other careers. I’d always loved cooking and cooked for friends all the time, so one thing morphed into another and I decided to write a cookbook. I was very naïve though, I thought it would be easy to get published, but unless you’re already known and have a restaurant it’s actually very difficult. There were many, many rejections before I got published, and my family wasn’t supportive because they thought I was wasting a good education, but I persevered because I was very passionate about it.
Has living in different countries influenced your cooking?
I grew up eating Indian food at home, but because we lived in Switzerland we’d also eat Swiss and Italian food, and then I moved to England for university. I see different elements of different cuisines coming up in my food, and often I’ll fuse them together and experiment.
You must enjoy being creative in the kitchen?
Absolutely, though it’s very random. I’ll use the ingredients that I happen to have in the kitchen and try out new combinations. Other times something will be in season so that gets me thinking.
You’ve worked in restaurant kitchens around the world, how was that?
I loved it. Restaurant kitchens are amazing because there is so much energy and they’re always full of amazing characters, and when you love food you just want to learn more and more. It’s a hard life though, and because I wanted a family I knew that I couldn’t work until 12 o’clock at night all the time.
Is your family supportive now?
Totally, once the first book came out it all made sense to them and they were instantly proud of me, they had the book displayed in every room of their house! When I was creating the recipes I remember many times calling my mum and saying, ‘How do you make that again?’ Or, ‘Do you remember that dish we ate somewhere?’ And then at some point it changed, and she started calling me.
Do you think it’s important to pass recipes through the generations?
Definitely, that’s the biggest problem these days – a lot of the younger generations don’t cook and don’t want to, and the fact their mothers stopped cooking means the knowledge is being lost from every culture. Traditional dishes can be complicated, particularly Indian dishes, but they just need modernising and simplifying otherwise we’ll end up losing the recipes and I find that very sad. Everyone should write their own little personal cookbook they can give to their children or their nieces and nephews.
You’re credited with being one of the first cookery writers to make Indian food more healthy and accessible, how do you feel about that?
I started cooking for health reasons. I grew up overweight and did every fad diet under the sun in the 80s to try and lose weight but found that I would keep putting it back on even though I was being very disciplined. Then I realised that actually you need to enjoy what you eat when you’re losing weight and that way it becomes a lifestyle. So I took my love of Indian food and thought if I start with that and make it healthy then I’m onto a winning formula, and that’s what I did. Restaurant food is always unhealthier than what you cook at home, what Indian restaurants serve in the UK is not really what Indians would eat. We’ve been eating Indian food the same way for 50 years, but I think it’s changing. I still practice what I preach; I eat healthy Indian food at home regularly.
Obviously you wanted to publish a cookbook, but did you want to be in the media?
Not at all, I was awful on television to begin with! The first few times I went on a show it was live and I totally seized up while I cooked the dish, I got the words out but there was no happiness on my face, it was just panic. The turning point was when they invited me on when I was eight months pregnant and I don’t know whether it was the pregnancy hormones, or because something so much more important was about to happen to me, but I just didn’t care. I ignored the cameras and I was myself. I love what I do but enjoy the balance of quiet times cooking and writing at home with days of filming.
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