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The 50th anniversary edition of Jaffrey's ground-breaking book comes out on 21 November, beautifully illustrated with Jaffrey's drawings and a foreword by chef and fellow cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi.

"It's amazing how prescient the title of the book was for the arc of Jaffrey's writing career," said Matt Sartwell of the legendary New York City food bookstore Kitchen Arts and Letters. "When An Invitation to Indian Cooking first came out in 1973 in the US, cooking Indian food was challenging for many people, as the availability of ingredients was highly erratic. Fifty years ago, people didn't think casually about mail ordering from a vendor in some other part of the country," he recalled.

Born in 1933, in pre-Partition India, Jaffrey was the youngest of six children in an affluent Delhi-based family. Her histrionic talents took her to London, where she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and worked in the city's theatre scene. She married fellow Indian dramatist Saeed Jaffrey, with whom she migrated to America in 1958. While she swiftly rose to fame as a film actress, notably in Merchant-Ivory productions, Jaffrey's journey in New York City took a different turn after parting ways with Saeed in 1966.

Navigating the complexities of solo parenthood with three children, Jaffrey found solace and purpose in her culinary prowess, cooking and entertaining frequently at home. After winning an award for her work in a film called Shakespeare Wallah, she was approached by The New York Times food critic, Craig Claibornefor an interview. This fortuitous meeting gave Jaffrey an unforeseen visibility, a windfall she astutely decided to channel into the creation of a cookbook.

As recounted by legendary book editor, Judith Jones, in her memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, Jaffrey's manuscript was extremely compelling. Jones wrote, "When Madhur Jaffrey's manuscript came to me at Knopf, I was immediately persuaded that food-conscious Americans were ready for authentic Indian cuisine, particularly if they had someone as skilful as Madhur guiding them. She was canny enough to realise, it was apparent, that she had to seduce us slowly, step by step."