India's original Master Chef Tarla Dalal

The Wizard of Cooking 

For many Indian foodies and educated – and also the somewhat educated-women of a certain age, today’s papers brought an end to an era –an era of good, simple, old style cooking , taught to the masses in a language and idiom almost everyone can understand. It announced the end of the Tarla Dalal era.

Years before most Indians knew the meaning of the word chef, and long before chefs started sporting the cylindrical headgear(a part of the kitchen hygiene drill), Tarla with her lose hair tied into a neat bun, sporting only a smile to accessorise her saree, she appeared in photographs—generally in the Femina of the yore. She did two, three even ten to fifteen pages of recipes when the size of the page was bigger, and the number of photographs much smaller. People knew her as a great cook.Possibly she taught at a well known catering institute in Mumbai that was Bombay. Her envelope-sized books on different styles of cooking and veg and non veg recipes, regional and other food etc sold  more than hot cakes did those days. And then she moved on to the traditional book format, wrote cook books for microwave manufacturers, thus moving ahead with technology. She also constantly reinvented herself. Hugely popular master chef Sanjeev Kapoor may or may not have been the first to hit Indian tv with food shows, but Tarla was not far behind. In one show , there she was , playing not the master chef, but the experienced aunty teaching  chefs to cook. And of course, her website, which also credited many of her young students, friends and fans for recipes contributed by them.

I will never forget two things about the lady I have unfortunately  never met in person. One is the fact that many young ladies—daughters of friends—learnt to make the mango cheesecake, using her recipe. From her web site, they learnt how to make it without having to take the trouble of sourcing cream cheese –not easily available  in most of India and not affordable in any case.

The other is the two bound volumes of the cookery pages of Femina from the late 60s through the 80s—my mother subscribed to the magazine because of these pages that helped her stay afloat in the very competitive world of cookery for army wives! The pages are much thumbed, dog eared, yellowed, brittle and all but falling apart. But when I am not very sure that any of the zillions of recipes on the net will work for me, I go back to those pages, with Tarla Dalal smiling at me as she teaches me how to make….the best Shahi Tukre !

Rest in Peace Tarla Aunty. We love you. Will miss you..

PS: Have downloaded the first picture on the net, simply because this smile was her permanent accessory.