Tarla Dalal was a cookbook author, celebrity chef, and hosted popular cooking shows. She became a cookery legend when there was no Youtube, Facebook in the world and also won the Padma Shri.
Cooking is a hobby for some people, but few create wonder with that passion. In today’s world, we have YouTube, Facebook, and other social media platforms to show our talent to the world, whether it is dancing, singing, acting, or cooking, but there was nothing available in the 1960s to explore such talent.
A lady who asserted that doing your work totally will lead to success regardless of the means. Tarla Dalal is the one who demonstrated that by becoming a family member in everyone’s home with her culinary shows, books, and quick cooking suggestions.
Tarla Dalal was born in and moved to Pune, Maharastra, where she married Nalin Dalal in 1960. She moved to Mumbai after becoming a housewife and turned her traditional Indian cuisine into a career, for which she was praised.
In 1966, she began offering cooking lessons to her neighbours, and as the popularity of her recipes grew, she began teaching non-fussy Indian vegetarian cuisine, as well as Mexican and Italian meals.
This gave rise to her first book, “The Pleasure of Vegetarian Cooking,” which went viral and renowned in 1974, selling 1.5 million copies. Because of the success of her first book in Hindi, the book was translated into several languages such as Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, and even foreign languages such as Russian and Dutch, which piqued her interest in writing more cookery books, and she nearly wrote 170 books on various recipes, cultures, and habits.
Her books also included specific categories such as cooking with less oil, morning meals, food for pregnant women, children, and so on. She also published a series on health for those who are health-conscious.
On becoming a cooking show host and other topics. Tarla began to attempt new vegetarian versions from non-vegetarian versions of foreign nations, and people began to suggest that if you wanted to see your daughter married, send her to Tarla cooking school. Her success earned her the opportunity to host a cookery show called “Cook it up with Tarla Dalal” on Sony Entertainment. The show has been running successfully for three years and has brought people much closer to her than her books, garnering fans not only from India but also from the Gulf, South East Asia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Tarla has generated over 17000 recipes, and her website is generally recognised as the largest Indian food recipe vegetarian site for both traditional and foreign cuisines. In addition to books and presenting a programme, Tarla offered a bi-monthly magazine called Cooking and More. Tarla’s books were so popular in every Indian woman’s heart that she sold more than 3 million copies of her recipe books; the lady who was never seen outside the kitchen had made history with her interpretation of genius.
Tarla Dalal was named “Woman of the Year” by the Indian Merchants Chamber in 2005, and she provided an example for every Indian woman by demonstrating how she turned her everyday routine into a passion and achieved success.
Tarla Dalal was given the Padma Shri in the presence of President APJ Abdul Kalam in Rashtrapathi Bhavan in 2007, becoming the first woman to receive this honour. Tarla Dalal died in 2013 at the age of 77, leaving her legacy to her three children, who are in charge of her websites, recipe book productions, and social media profiles.
