Books
Some like it hot
11.07.08 Victoria Arnstein
It’s five to four on what feels like the hottest day of the year so far. Having braved the heat of the Tube and located the restaurant where I am to meet Anjum Anand, my phone rings. I expect the worst, aware that a colleague was recently let down at the last minute by another TV chef, but it’s just a courtesy call—Anjum is stuck in traffic and will be with me shortly.
When she arrives she looks as though she has stepped out of a TV studio—glossy black hair that looks perfectly salon blow-dried with immaculate clothes and make up. After ordering drinks—Anand opts for a green tea (it helps aid digestion, she says)—she is quick to start chatting about how she came to front the BBC show “Indian Food Made Easy” and how it felt when the tie-in title knocked Harry Potter off the Amazon number-one spot (“A moment of elation and disbelief, I mean Harry Potter is Harry Potter, he’s big,” she exclaims).
Anand was born in Britain and grew up in Switzerland. When the time came to start her O-Levels, her businessman father relocated the family back to the UK. Anand, who speaks French and Spanish, then took a business and languages degree at the European Business School in London but after beginning work realised she no longer enjoyed what she was doing.
She had simultaneously started cooking more in a bid to eat healthier Indian food. “The more time I spent cooking the more I loved it. I thought ‘I know, I’ll write a cookbook’ with the naïvety of someone who has never done anything like that,” she laughs. A visit to Books for Cooks confirmed a gap in the market so she went to the library, copied down some publishers’ names and wrote to them. “They were like ‘it is a great idea, but who are you?’”
After working in restaurants in New York, LA and New Delhi, Anand pitched her idea again through an agent. The result was Indian Every Day (Headline, 2003) and bits of work for UKTV Food’s Great Food Live followed. “I was really awful,” Anand insists. The turning point came when she was invited back when she was eight months pregnant.
“I went on, this hugely pregnant woman, and I could not care less whether anyone liked me or not—there were hormones raging and I was glowing from the thought I was going to be a mother. I turned the corner and I’ve never cared [about the cameras] since.” Then the BBC approached her about “Indian Food Made Easy”, which aired in summer 2007. The second show is scheduled to start in November and the next tie-in, Anjum’s New India (Quadrille, £20 hardback), is out in September.
Anand recounts her parents’ initial displeasure with her career change. “As an Indian woman you are never encouraged to go into the food industry as a profession because your mother cooked her whole life and your mother’s mother did that and you have a chance to have a good education.” But typical proud Indian parents is how Anand describes them now. “Everywhere they went they carried a [copy of the first] book with them. I would go to the house and there would be a copy in every room just in case their guests went in one room and not the other.”
While the first title focused on quick and easy Indian meals, the next series and book will focus on different regions of India. “As a nation [the UK] we still see chicken tikka masala, chicken korma and pilau rice as representative of Indian food and it is so not the case. The range of Indian food is vast.”
One of the next projects in the pipeline could be a cookbook about Indian food for children, although she realises there are some bridges to cross before Indian takeaway-loving Brits see it as food suitable for kids. “To me it is the healthiest cuisine even though everyone here [the UK] doesn’t think so. If my daughter doesn’t have Indian food everyday I feel like she is malnourished.” She applauds campaigns for better food education and healthier school meals too. “Some children don’t know about vegetables, my daughter is three and she knows the name of every vegetable.”
It sounds as though she’s ready to join the raft of campaigning celebrity chefs, but with one difference—Anand doesn’t see herself as a celebrity. “I’ve never been in it for fame, it is not what drives me.”
What about the constant comparisons to Nigella Lawson? Anand acknowledges that, as far as comparisons go, it could be worse, but hopes people will soon start to know her as herself. “She [Nigella] is fantastic at what she does. I do think she must be fed up hearing about this Indian girl who is the new her though because that would really irritate me,” she laughs.
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