Tarla Dalal: The Queen of Indo-Western Cuisine

For those of you who don't know, Tarla Dalal is a pioneer of Indian cookbooks and Indian-Western cuisine. As someone who grew up studying her cookbooks, not for the recipes but to understand cultural context, I was deeply saddened to hear that she suffered from a heart-attack on November 6, 2013. Born in 1936, she has published over 100 vegetarian cookbooks as diverse and specific as Microwave Subzis, Acidity Cookbook- 50 Stomach Friendly Recipes, Exotic Diabetic Cooking, Cooking with Sprouts, Popular Restaurant Gravies, a series of children's cookbooks, a prenatal cookbook, as well as Mexican, Chinese, and Italian cookbooks. Her books are present in kitchens all across India and everywhere the Indian Diaspora spread. Her empire includes TV shows, the largest Indian food web-site, a line of ready-to-cook mixes, and her own magazine.

                            While Dalal's expertise is in Gujarati cooking, she was also one of the first people to introduce non-Indian cooking to India. Although her Western and international recipes in reality don't always resemble the food within those cuisines, her work was still revolutionary in its own right. She made non-Indian cooking more accessible than ever to Indian home-cooks. 

Vegetable Horns?

Flipping through the pages of my mother's Tarla Dalal books as a young girl, I would snicker at how ridiculous the recipes sounded compared to my American understanding of food. In her debut, Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking, her recipe for Baked Spaghetti in Tomato Sauce calls for ghee, tomato ketchup, chili powder, sugar, capsicum, and "100 grams grated cooking cheese". What kind of person makes marinara sauce from ketchup? And what the hell is cooking cheese? Surely the real Italian deal was the spaghetti I ate at the Olive Garden. At 9 years old, the fact that she used British spellings and the metric system meant she was from another planet. Not to mention she measured in teacups instead of good ol' regular cups and spelt coconut like cocoanut! The gall!

But in the same way that "ethnic" recipes are modified for the Western palate and pantry in US , so too are the recipes in Dalal's many cookbooks which contain ingredients that can easily be found in Indian grocery stores. Westerners have tried to commodify Indian cuisine for ages from marketing curry powder to "naan hot dogs" (Yes I've seen them at Whole Foods). Tarla Dalal is a refreshing example of the opposite, adapting the West to fit the East. Her immense influence will live beyond her life  and she is certainly a person worth knowing about for anyone interested in the history and spread of cuisines.
















Also check out all the stuff she made for this kid's birthday. So jealous of this brat.