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Tarla Dalal, India’s first celebrity chef, who died at the age of 77 in Mumbai on Wednesday, brought the world into Indian kitchens; she took Indian cooking to homes across the world as well. Thanks to her, generations of home cooks and food enthusiasts took to cooking and got the basics right. The complex and fancy food she simplified with her recipes that called for easily available ingredients.
She learnt to cook in the 1960s, after getting engaged, then started teaching cookery at home and went on to write her first book, The Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking (1974), which was a big hit.
This set in motion a steamroller of an enterprise that encompassed several more cookery books, TV shows, a range of instant mixes which were later acquired by International Bestfoods and, of course, a huge presence on the Internet.
Google any Indian recipe today and Tarla Dalal’s will be right up there. She told The Hindu in an interview in 2007 that she had lost count of the number of books she had written; one report puts the number at over 100 and says they have sold over three million copies. They have been translated into several languages in India and abroad. The Government honoured her with a Padma Shri six years ago. She is survived by three children.
One noticed an array of her books first in the 1990s — all vegetarian, but not all Indian. There was Exciting Vegetarian Cooking, Mexican Cooking, Italian Cooking, and books that gave meal plans. There were books on chaats, idlis, mousses and cheesecakes and microwave cooking.
An easy recipe one often resorted to as a fledgling cook involved just flavoured gelatine and a slab of ice-cream — you only needed to follow pack instructions, mix up the two, wait for it to set in the fridge and voila, you had a special dessert! Now, as a working woman often short of time and inspiration, recipes for one-dish meals of khichdis from her Gujarati and Rajasthani cookbooks come in handy.
Reportedly, she created 17,000 recipes. Surely, that’s not all. For, all those she has inspired are, in a way, hers in spirit.
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