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When people quote L.P. Hartley's famous maxim “The past is another country,” they mostly mean to say how remote the past seems to us, how foreign. For Delhi-born Madhur Jaffrey, however, that maxim holds near-literal truth: the past really is another country. Jaffrey was born in 1933, a full 14 years before India split from its British masters and then split into pieces with Partition and the founding of modern-day Pakistan. The country of Jaffrey's birth no longer exists, and even Delhi has changed. With the flight of its Muslims and the torrents of new refugees, it swelled from under one million to its current size of 15 million. These days, the only place you'll see the ordered, small-town, colonial Delhi of the 1930s is in Merchant Ivory films.

Jaffrey has acted in her fair share of those, but let's pause to admire her writing, and specifically her just-published autobiography, Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India (Knopf, $33). It's a handsome object, full of family photographs and deckled stock, and a charming read, evocative of Jaffrey's sense of humour and deep love of family and food.

On the line from her upstate New York home, Jaffrey is thoughtful and measured, though she's quick to laugh if a question delights her. “I started writing rather late,” she begins, “because I was in a Broadway play. I thought I would be able to write in the mornings and go to the show in the evenings, but somehow that didn't work out. So eventually I left the play and I said, 'Okay I have a deadline. I must sit and start writing.' And certain things just came””helped by talking to my brothers and sisters....We all got together at my sister's house [in India], and all the cousins brought their photographs and as we were looking at them, we were reliving 50 years ago, 60 years ago. It was wonderful...It was almost like therapy of some kind.”

Family therapy does come into play in Jaffrey's autobiography, particularly around a charismatic but moody uncle who colours the whole extended family. This uncle, Shibbudada, emerges as a dark force; it's clear from the text that Jaffrey is still angry with him for his divisive actions. “He was a very influential man,” she says now, “so he was like the god of our house. If you weren't in his favour, you were really in the dock and you had no hope of ever making it in life. That's what I felt then. And I started talking to my cousins, and they said that he treated them in exactly the same way. But because he was such a god for some reason, we never talked to each other about it, and each one of us suffered quietly. If only we'd talked to each other, we could have had confidence in numbers.” Perhaps for this reason, she's more muted in how she describes the book's reception: “It's been mixed. Some people are very happy with it; some people don't like being in the book at all....I think that's what happens with memoirs, that you annoy someone always. So it's a dangerous thing to write.”

Jaffrey's parents come across well. “My parents are very special people,” Jaffrey says. “My father, really he was quite liberal in letting us do whatever we wanted to do. We never wanted to do anything too wild, but we certainly wanted to go in our own direction and he never stopped us. That's a remarkable thing in a family....My parents certainly were gentle and thoughtful and kind, and I think that's””you can't give more than that to your kids.”

Jaffrey explores the role nature may have played in her development as well. Some of that is temperament, as she writes: “I feel I inherited my mother's desire to excel. But whereas she quietly accepted the limitations of her times, I was given the luxury of rebellion by very loving and indulgent parents.” Elsewhere in the book she wonders: “I sometimes think that I was a creation of my father's imagination. Everything he could not allow himself to be, he let me be. When I came along, he already had his perfect family, two good-looking boys followed by two good-looking girls, all bright and healthy. I was odd-looking anyway. Huge, honest, I-see-everything, you-can't-fool-me eyes, and angry, flaring nostrils. With me, he let go. He let me be outspoken and independent.”

There's a deeper force at play too. Jaffrey notes that her family is part of the Kayastha caste. “It was a caste of scribes,” she explains on the phone. “Writers, people who kept records. Our caste was a caste of letters. So we wrote and read: that was our business. It's so interesting to me that thousands of years later, here I am writing. Why am I writing? Nobody told me to write. But I'm writing and a lot of members of my family write. My daughter writes. There's something in the makeup of our genes””must be””because it can't be because we do what the caste tells us to do. We're just doing it because that's what we're inclined to do.”

Climbing the Mango Trees makes clear that Jaffrey does what she's inclined to do. She wonders if her rebellious streak was shaped by the country of her birth. “India is a lot about 'This is what is expected of us.' It's not always said in so many words, but I've always said, 'I don't want to do this. This is expected of me? I don't want to do it. I want to find my own way in the world.' I think this has been a part of my personality.”

To the suggestion that she's managed to fulfill a millenniums-old destiny in spite of herself, she laughs: “That's life.”

The book is full of family reminiscence, Indian history (particularly of the years of independence), and food. Especially food, as befits a cookbook author to-be. “I began to wonder as I got older,” she explains, “how is it that I could re-create the tastes of my childhood so far away from India? And then I began to think that actually I probably stored everything in my head, all the taste memories were in my head....If you have a good palate, you are actually receiving a whole lot of information that you may do nothing with for a while, but it's still there. And I think that helped me to re-create dishes.”

The book contains 32 recipes to help the rest of us sample Jaffrey's culinary heritage, though her own cooking is wide-ranging. “It doesn't have to be an elaborate meal. It could be a roast chicken with something nice to go with it. These days, there's lovely squashes and all kinds of beans. So that's what we'll eat. For example, tonight it's what's in the market. You go and look and see what's the freshest in the market, and that's what you eat. When you say 'slow food', people assume it's going to take hours to cook, and they don't always have the time. Though tomorrow, I'm going to make osso buco for just my husband and me. You just stick it in the oven, basically, and it just cooks itself. Some things are slow, but some things are quite fast: a quick stir-fry, we'll even have sometimes a hamburger made from good meat.”

With her Hollywood career and her numerous cookbooks, Jaffrey's no stranger to airports. She says travel has given her an open mind. “It's an endless quest to know more and understand more. I think if people travelled more, they'd see human beings as one. They're so similar. Why are we killing each other? Why are we fighting with each other? Your life is limited, and we're all so similar to each other. Why look at the differences constantly?”

She says this perspective comes from living through Partition. “We were Hindus and Muslims, living side by side in India. In this particular time, I think I learned how quickly you can become enemies. Nothing changes except some bit of politics and from just neighbours you become enemies. And it happened in Israel and Palestine; it happens in so many parts of the world. At one moment you're just neighbours, and then something happens to politicize the situation and you start killing each other. I just can't think of people as enemies because of their religion or their caste or their country of origin. I just can't do it. It's not in me. And I can't understand people who do. I always feel, 'These people have not travelled.'”