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Leading the Way Forty years
after publishing her landmark
Indian cookbook, Julie Sahni is
still cooking. By Khushbu Shah
THE TASTEMAKER
MARCH 2020
IT’S A CRISP FALL DAY IN NEW YORK, the kind where sunlight
bleeds through the windows and onto the floor like melted
butter, and Julie Sahni is in the process of dicing a green chile.
She is teaching me how to make ande ki bhurji, or scrambled
eggs with cumin and herbs, in her small-but-efficient kitchen
in Brooklyn Heights where she lives and teaches her legendary
Indian cooking classes.
While prepping her mise en place for the eggs, she casually
name-drops the people she has taught to cook Indian food. This
is not Sahni bragging; this is just her reality. The list includes
everyone from legendary food writers to influential CEOs and
chefs of Michelin-starred restaurants. Sahni turns her attention
to the gas stove and gently melts a luxuriously large spoonful
of ghee —the amount you know will make anything taste good.
Not taking her attention off the pan, she sheepishly reveals to
me that Gourmet used to send staffers to take her class so they
could more accurately edit Indian writers like Madhur Jaffrey.
While Jaffrey is arguably the more famous Indian cookbook
author (perhaps due to Sahni’s reluctance regarding the inter-
net), it is Sahni, 74, who is responsible for first introducing
Americans to Indian home cooking. Her seminal cookbook,
Classic Indian Cooking, was published exactly 40 years ago
and still remains a beloved reference text for Indians and non-
Indians alike. (Food writer Mark Bittman, for example, said in
The New York Times Magazine that Sahni’s cookbooks were
“instrumental in helping me gain a foothold” in cooking Indian
food.) Personally, I first came across Classic Indian Cooking
nearly a decade ago as a college student who was homesick
for the flavors of my mother’s kitchen but had no easy set of
recipes to mimic.
As she sautés the large chunks of onions and cooks the eggs
(“Indians don’t like a soft scramble,” she warns), Sahni explains
that she fell into a life of cooking professionally through a series
of unexpected events. The second of four daughters from an
upper-class family in New Delhi, Sahni spent her teens as a
nationally acclaimed classical dancer before she headed off to
architecture school. Soon after, she added a master’s degree in
city planning from Columbia University to her resume, while
taking cooking classes for fun on the side. It was coworkers at
the New York City Planning Commission who first convinced
her to teach an Indian cooking class. At the time, she says with
a laugh, “I was mapping out the subways and such.”
Soon after, in 1974, The New York Times writer Florence
Fabricant wrote up one of Sahni’s classes, noting that “some day
it may become her vocation rather than a pastime.” Fabricant’s
Julie Sahni
enjoys fresh
paratha with
Ande Ki Bhurji
(recipe at right).
photography by SARAH CROWDER
