She has been called Scotland’s Madhur Jaffrey but as a working mother Tasnim Hussain believes she is an even better cook than television’s original curry queen. The author of Curries Made Simple has already taught thousands of Scots how to cook their own version of the nation’s favourite takeaway and is about to appear on national television to share her hot tips with millions of viewers.

There the comparisons end. Hussain, whose family are from Pakistan, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the purist Jaffrey, an Indian. Jaffrey advocates grinding your own spices, checking vegetable slices with a ruler and soaking dried tamarinds before making the paste. For Hussain, life is too short to measure a mushroom.

“Who has time for that? Like many mothers I work and when I get in at night, I’m tired so I don’t want to spend hours over the cooker,” says Hussain, a maths teacher in a Glasgow girls’ fee-paying secondary school.

Instead of toiling for hours and using every pot in the house, as you would following Jaffrey’s instructions, her recipes use only a handful of spices — chilli, turmeric and garam masala — and involve nifty short cuts such as chopping chillies (no need to de-seed), coriander, garlic, spring onions and freezing them in tubs, and cooking and freezing batches of onion sauce, the base for most of her dishes.

Her self-published book sold more than 5,000 copies within six months of hitting the shelves and now her 21st-century cuisine has caught the attention of Anjum Anand, the presenter of Made Easy, on BBC2, which will feature Hussain in the second series when it airs in the autumn.

“Having taught maths for 20 years to children, I can express instructions in simple terms,” she says, while deftly frying pakora in her Glasgow home.

As a second-generation Punjabi immigrant, growing up in Edinburgh, Hussain watched her mother washing rice, assembling pakora and patting out batches of chappatis for every meal.

What she didn’t do, however, was learn how to do it herself. “When I got married I couldn’t cook. I had to phone her up all the time when I was a young wife to ask her how to make the simplest dishes.”

When you are living with your new husband’s family, and teaching trigonometry at the chalk face all day, this is a recipe for stress. “I wanted to cook traditional food for my husband and my children Sophina and Yousuf, who are now 20 and 15. But traditional food takes time to prepare and I simply didn’t have the time to do all that chopping, grinding and mixing.”

So Hussain applied her logical, mathematical brain to these domestic problems. If you have x amount of time and y grammes of chopped chicken, what do you need to add to have tea on the table before the start of Reporting Scotland?

“I was doing this long before Delia came up with her timesaving techniques,” she says. “The secret is in doing all the preparation beforehand and freezing it so all you have to do to make a curry is fry up some onion sauce you’ve made earlier, add a couple of spices and the main ingredient: chicken, lamb or whatever. Within minutes you have a delicious curry.

“I always have tandoori chicken in my freezer that I can take out if I have unexpected guests.”

These new methods caused some controversy in her husband’s family. “They didn’t understand why I was making such a fuss about cooking at the weekend rather than preparing a meal from scratch every night, but then none of the women worked.

“At first they thought it would affect the taste, but it doesn’t at all. Now that their own daughters are working they see that this is a huge timesaver and have passed on my tips.”

In fact her recipes are so easy to follow that even kitchenphobics can conjure up an impressive feast of fragrantly spiced dishes on a first attempt.

“One former colleague who had never cooked before picked up my book and made an entire meal for a family gathering. Everyone congratulated her sister on the delicious curries and asked for her recipes. They couldn’t believe it when they found out who had done the cooking.”

Unlike Delia, a recent convert to tinned mince and frozen potato, there are certain short cuts Hussain won’t take. She cooks rice in the traditional way: on the stove, using fried onions and spices and letting the grain absorb the correct amount of measured water. And her chappatis and naan breads come hot off a griddle and are finished under the grill.

“Store-bought chappatis are always too dry and tough. The secret of a soft chappati is not to use too much flour when you are rolling out the dough. Before you put it on the griddle shake off as much flour as possible. The reason Asians pass it from hand to hand is it makes the chapatti bigger and gets rid of dried flour.”

Despite living in Glasgow for 20 years Hussain has no truck with the ersatz dishes that appear on the city’s old school curry house menus. “There’s no such thing as chicken tikka masala in traditional cooking,” she says.

“Literally, it just means a piece of chicken in a masala, which is onion sauce. Vindaloo is completely made up and we do not have this macho custom of trying to compete with each other about eating the hottest curry. A korma to me does not have yoghurt or cream in the sauce.

“And we would never, ever eat poppadums. They are Indian, for a start, not Punjabi, and eating a pile of them before your meal is like eating several bags of crisps. I don’t even put snacks out for guests when they come to my house for a meal because I don’t want to spoil their appetite.

“We also don’t eat more than one curry at a time at home, unless there are guests or we are at a wedding. We would only serve a vegetable or a chicken or a lamb or a lentil curry with rice, or chappati, or naan bread. We don’t have starters — I serve pakora with salad as a lunch in itself.”

Although she is passionate about converting Scots to genuine Punjabi cuisine, there is one mongrel dish Hussain has embraced. “There is no better way to finish a meal than with slices of fresh mango with a big dollop of vanilla ice cream from Glasgow’s Queen’s Park Café.”

www.curriesmadesimple.co.uk

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