This obituary first appeared in the 7 November 2013 edition of Mail Today, Delhi/NCR. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers
By Sourish
Bhattacharyya
FROM Narendra Modi to India's first television chef Sanjeev
Kapoor, all of India is mourning the passing away of Tarla Dalal after a heart
attack at 77, for her cookbooks have been an essential ingredient of our
national life, and a rite of passage for the pre-internet generation, for four
decades since she was first published in 1974.
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| Tarla Dalal lifted home cooking from its cycle of predictability and affected the lives of millions in the pre-internet age |
A chatty Mumbai homemaker with a sunny temperament and
halting command over English, who'd gained a considerable following for the cooking
classes she was running at her Napean Sea Road home since 1966, Tarla Dalal (with
her husband taking dictations) spent 18 months writing The Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking. It became a runaway
best-seller after its debut in 1974 and a mandatory gift for brides in an age when
cookbooks and Eve's Weekly were the
only sources of recipes, and it was eventually translated into six languages
(including Dutch and Russian).
With the cookbook, Dalal took home cooking with everyday
ingredients to a new level of replicable creativity, lifting it out of its
self-limiting cycle of predictability with her brand of accessible excitement.
She was the grandmother of comfort food even before the term became
fashionable. Betty Crocker was a figment of a publisher's imagination; Tarla
Dalal was real. Her constituency was the country's mushrooming middle-class
trying hard to bring some excitement to its table. And she achieved the
impossible: to quote Atul Sikand, founder of Facebook's most vibrant Indian
recipe-sharing community, Sikandalous Cuisine, "she made simple recipes,
which are the toughest to get right, seem so easy to do".
Inspired to become a hobby chef by Dalal's cookbooks, Sikand
remembers meeting his idol when he was 23-24, fresh out of his development
economics master's programme at the University of Sussex, and asking her about
how to get his kadhi right. She
explained the intricacies of her recipe with the patience of an indulgent aunt
and even said how he would become a great chef one day. Of course, he never
became one!
Even chefs are proud to admit that they have liberally
borrowed from Dalal's cookbooks. She authored 170 of them, which have sold more
than four million copies, and her TV show,
Cook It Up with Tarla Dalal,
ran on Sony Entertainment Television for three years. Yet, she was candid
enough to announce in Harmony
magazine some years back that she had stopped cooking, leaving the job of
creating recipes to a team of chefs and nutritionists guided by her. The pre-internet
diva's website, www.tarladalal.com, which is run by her son Sanjay, now has
17,500-plus recipes that people pay to access.
Sabyasachi 'Saby' Gorai, whom Dalal had ranked in 2003 as one
of India's top 10 chefs in the in-flight magazine of Jet Airways, says he
dipped into these cookbooks to sex up the vegetarian fare served to the 25,000
people who ate daily at the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge Centre cafeteria.
"Where else but in Tarla Dalal's cookbooks could I have found recipes for
vegetarian dishes with a Mexican twist?" asks Gorai, adding that when he
was working in Australia, chefs at Indian restaurants liberally borrowed from Dalal.
Rushina Munshaw Ghildayal, corporate food consultant, blogger
and modern-day Tarla Dalal, says her icon was special because she touched the
everyday lives of ordinary people. Her Gujarati parents gifted her Tarla
Dalal's cookbooks when she got married and, Rushina recalls, she got addicted
to 'Spanish Rice' (a desi version of
a vegetarian paella), a recipe she had picked up from one of the books, when
she was pregnant.
Few middle-class Indians who grew up in the pre-internet age
can say they haven't had a Tarla Dalal moment in their lives. She taught us how
to cook at home and make our next meal a little more exciting.
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