Ismail Merchant

Ismail Merchant (1936 – 2005) was best known as the producer of such films as Heat and Dust, A Room with a View and Howards End. Among his friends and colleagues, however, he was equally well known for producing memorable Indian meals. Ismail left Bombay in the late fifties to study at New York University, where he gained an MA in Business Administration. He had decided on a career in films in childhood; his first film was shown at the Cannes film festival, en route to which he met director James Ivory in New York. Together with writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala they forged the partnership that has been the success story of independent film production for the last thirty years. Ismail began cooking when he left India as a student in 1958, in order to entertain people and to enjoy Indian food. His cooking was based on traditional Indian principles, but was also influenced by his many years in the West. Ismail was never taught to cook — India was s a country where men were superfluous in the kitchen — but he always went shopping with his father and has inherited his infallible judgement of quality. Ismail' s talents of film-production and cooking often merges as he cooked for film cast and crew, usually to celebrate the end of a successful location shoot. He was known for the ease and speed with which he prepared feasts for any number of guests, frequently in the most unlikely places.