For Jyoti Mukharji, cooking didn't come naturally. In her early days in the kitchen as a medical school grad, she recalls making watery daals and hard rotis that cracked in your mouth like a chip. But ...

Aimee Levitt is a freelance writer in Chicago. Madhur Jaffrey initially became a cookbook author, she writes in the first line of An Invitation to Indian Cooking, “as a gradual maneuver in ...