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The cook who took haute cuisine to the street

Manoj John pays tributes to India’s first celebrity cook Tarla Dalal who passed away, leaving behind a legacy of taking international cuisine to the common folk.

Tarla Dalal, who gave birth to over 17,000 recipes and wrote over 100 best-selling cookbooks, breathed her last. Dubbed as India’s first celebrity cook, Dalal died of cardiac arrest at her residence in Mumbai on November 6. The 77-year old widow is survived by three children.

She hosted cookery shows like ‘Tarla Dalal Show’ and ‘Cook It Up With Tarla Dalal’ on TV. Her show was broadcast all over South East Asia, India, the Gulf, the UK and the US. Her early cookery shows were much like today’s popular soap operas which people would die to watch.

Some consider her one of the top five best-selling cookery authors in the world, selling more than three million copies. She wrote about many cuisines, but Gujarati cuisine was her forte. She also ran one of the largest Indian food websites, and published a bi-monthly magazine, Cooking & More. She was conferred Padma Shri in 2007.

Tarla grew up in Alibag, near Mumbai. She was married to Nalin Dalal in 1960 and moved to Mumbai after marriage. She started conducting cooking classes from her home in 1966, and this consummated in the publication of her first cookbook, The Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking, in 1974. The book sold like hot cake. Her books have been translated into Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Dutch and Russian.

Her range of pre-mixes, Tarla Dalal Mixes was acquired by International Bestfoods Ltd in 2000. In 2007 she started her Total Health Series cookbook series. Dalal would collect cookbooks on her trips to foreign countries, modify recipes to suit vegetarian palates back home, and then learn them herself. These would be served to her family, and subsequently, reach generations of aspiring cooks.

Food blogger Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal said there might have been cookbooks before Dalal penned hers own, but they had never captivated generations of home cooks the way hers did. “My first recipe book was by Tarla Dalal, on recipes from all over India,” recalls Munshaw-Ghildiyal. “And when I got married, my mother gifted me her book on Gujarati cooking.” The first dish that she whipped up had been ‘ek toplo dal bhat,’ a one-dish meal comprising rice, dal and vegetables. “What’s interesting is that unlike more cookbooks then (which were) targeted at the affluent and welltravelled, Tarla Dalal made international cuisine accessible to the average housewife,” said food and wine writer Antoine Lewis. The cheerfully Indianised dishes didn’t pretend to be authentic but acquainted readers here with food they might have only heard of.

Among them is the 58-year-old Amita Mehta, who attended Dalal’s classes over three decades ago as a newly wed. “I learnt all I know about cooking from her, from Mexican to Italian,” said Mehta. “She was the one who introduced so many Mumbai people to pastas and baked dishes. How to use an oven, how to bake biscuits — we learnt everything from her.”

Her legacy is that her books made it possible for common people to understand international food in an affordable way.