Remembering Tarla Dalal, the original masterchef

Sudhanshu Pandey

I first heard of Tarla Dalal when I was approached to co-host a cookery show, ‘Cook it Up with Tarla Dalal’, with her more than 20 years ago. After a successful modelling career, I had just entered the world of acting with the TV series ‘Kanyadaan’ and my debut movie, ‘Khiladi 420’, as a parallel lead with Akshay Kumar. I accepted the challenge as co-anchoring a cooking show seemed out of my comfort zone due to my non-existent cooking skills. The only brief I had about the show was that it should have a grandmother-grandkid vibe. And that’s exactly how Tarlaji came across when I first met her — a cute, old grandma.

Tribute to the culinary queen

• Born in 1936 in Pune, Tarla Dalal moved to Bombay after her marriage to Nalin Dalal in 1960.
• In 1966, she started cookery classes at home. The classes became an instant hit with a long waiting list. It was often said, “If you want to get your daughter married, send her to Mrs Dalal’s classes.”
• After her first cookbook, ‘The Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking’, in 1974, she went on to publish 170 more. Several of these have been translated into Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Dutch and Russian. She is the most sold cookbook author in India, with over 10 million copies.
• Her USP was creating vegetarian versions of international non-vegetarian recipes. She is credited with creating more than 17,000 recipes.
• She also published cooking magazines. In 2007, she started her ‘Total Health Series’ cookbook series.
• Her range of ready-to-cook mixes, Tarla Dalal Mixes, was acquired by International Bestfoods in 2000.
• Her first TV show, ‘Cook it up with Tarla Dalal’, was aired weekly on Sony TV for three years. The show was broadcast all over South-East Asia, the Gulf, the UK
• and the US.
• In 2007, Tarla Dalal was conferred with Padma Shri.
• She died of a heart attack on November 6, 2013.

I am a pure vegetarian and she is the queen of vegetarian cooking. We hit it off from the very beginning. As the show wasn’t a scripted one, our natural chemistry came across well. I had not done much research about her. I had just read enough to know that she was a top name in the cooking world who had made it big internationally.

Hence, whatever happened at the sets was pretty organic. This is how I approach all my characters even now. I believe in an absolutely natural and spontaneous process of creating something.

We shot 26 episodes over a span of two months. Tarlaji treated me like a kid. She would keep ordering me on the sets, “Tu yeh kar; ab chammach utha; karahi mei jeera dal….” And I would keep on teasing her, cracking jokes on the show and she would laugh at my banter, even during shots. Though she would control it, but I could see her stomach heaving with laughter. Tarlaji’s Gujarati accent, too, would sometime spark off many impromptu jokes. But she always took it sportingly. In fact, at times she laughed so uncontrollably that we had to stop the shoot.

As it was her first TV show, she would be shy and conscious while facing the camera, but it would vanish as soon as she would start cooking. Rest everything was my responsibility — to conduct the show, ask her questions, and keep it entertaining.

Tarlaji was very sweet and simple. Despite being an international name, she had no airs or attitude. In her mind, there was no hierarchy of people on the set — kaun upar hai, kaun kiske neeche hai. She was very affectionate towards each and every person on the set. After the shoot, she would invite everybody to come and eat or drink whatever she had made. Since I used to be the closest, I would grab a lion’s share for myself. Even after more than two decades, I can still recall a red-coloured fruit juice that tasted like elixir of life.

After the project was over, I would be reminded of her constantly because the popularity of the show was huge. It had become a global hit after its release in 2000. The show was watched across the world for a very long time, as the 26 episodes used to be played in a loop. The show was aired again after her death in November 2013.

I got a taste of her international fan following after the initial release. I had gone out for dinner in Mumbai when some fans of the show, who had come from the US, went crazy on seeing me, saying they loved our chemistry on the show.

An amazing learning for me was the celebration of a person at such a big level, simply because of her cooking skills. It was something new for me that somebody became an international star because of the recipes she created. As an actor and model, for me being a star or celebrity meant someone from my own field only.

In today’s fitness-conscious world where protein has become a buzzword, especially among gym-goers, there are many people who are under the mistaken belief that vegetarian food, especially the Indian fare, does not have many options and you can only get it from non-vegetarian food. They must read Tarlaji’s books and recipes. There is so much variety in her oeuvre that one lifetime would not be enough to try all her recipes. Unfortunately, due to the western influences, vegetarian cuisine has been underestimated. It is my staunch belief that it is the only way to live a healthy life. I am looking forward to watch her biopic, ‘Tarla’, to relive that beautiful phase of my life once again.

— The writer is a model and actor

(As told to Renu Sud Sinha)

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