Mistress of spices
Tara Deshpande recalls a childhood where fish was a staple at family meals. Goan vindaloo and dhansak were also part of the weekly menu, as was Spanish and Italian cuisine — especially her mother’s “legendary” paellas and lasagnas. And then there was the rich Konkani cuisine that Tara’s grandmother specialised in.
In fact, it was her grandmother’s treasure trove of recipes that gave Tara the idea for what would be her second literary effort — a cookbook called A Sense for Spice. Part cookbook, part food memoir, A Sense for Spice follows three generations of a family, who share a passion for good food and good times.
Tara was better known here as an actress (her film credits include Iss Raat Ki Subah Nahin, Style and Bombay Boys), former MTV veejay and model. There was even a collection of short stories and verse that she penned, published in 1999 under the title Fifty And Done. But after her marriage and subsequent shift to the US, Tara turned her attention to honing her culinary skills. Intensive stints at the French Culinary Institute in New York and Le Cordon Bleu in Paris followed, with Tara finally setting up her own catering business in the States. In a nod to her early professional years, Tara hosted a cooking show (Great Chocolate Cooking) and even had food stories and recipes published in newspapers in Boston and New York.
Then she decided to take some time to contemporise and translate some very old cookbooks her grandmother had gifted her, some with recipes dating back to the 1800s. “There were many ingredients, techniques and places in them that were unfamiliar and it led to a lot of research and I became a sort of food detective!” says Tara, talking about how A Sense of Spice came to be. “The book has culinary academia as well as a personal story that I hope will help readers relate to the recipes. I wanted very much to create a science and a classification of Indian cooking techniques and terms because it’s so incomparably rich and needs to be catalogued for the future like the French have done. If you go to any restaurant kitchen in NYC and tell a chef to deglaze a pan he knows what it means. Someday, I hope we can say ‘Phodni the gravy’, and the chef will know what to do!”
A Sense of Spice comes 14 years after Fifty and Done, but Tara says she never felt “distant” from her writing. “That’s because I was writing for newspapers,” she says. “I’ve been working on three literary projects. And then A Sense for Spice took four years to write. The glossary alone took a year!”
Having made a “comeback” to writing, Tara says she wouldn’t mind making a comeback to acting either — “provided there are roles for a chubby, middle-aged housewife who can cook,” she quips.
In any case, she is happy expressing her creativity through cooking and writing. “Food, films, fashion… they are all inextricably woven together and they all give you the satisfaction of creating something,”
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