Tara Deshpande

A Versatile Cook

Cooking is her raison d' etre, a life line. And Tara Deshpande is good at it. Dinners at her home are fun affairs with a serious touch. She takes her food and her guests seriously

Text & Photographs: Farzana Contractor

Cooking is not Tara Deshpande's hobby. Neither does she cook because she loves food and enjoys being in the kitchen etc, etc. Tara is not a gourmet dabbler. She is a woman who has some serious culinary experiences in her repertoire as cook, author and foodie. She actually was a big time caterer back in the US where she lived until recently.

That she started off in life as a stage actor and then a screen actor is another story. In fact, her life as she unfolded it for me seems like it is made up of many little stories put together. Born and raised in Bombay, Tara schooled at Cathedral and John Connon and then went to St. Xavier's College. It was when she was just 14 that she worked backstage with Atmaram Bhende, who you may better connect as Nandu Bhende's dad. "Mom called up Bapu and told him that I was very keen to see what it is to work with a theatre group. He was working on Peter Scheaffer's Black Comedy and said, "send her along." I did go along and got the opportunity to serve tea and help the artists change and so on. And then one day, just a week before opening, something happened to the leading lady and I was asked to step in!" Tara says she was bad, she said her lines like she was at an elocution contest!

Well, from then on she did about 15 plays, the big one being Alyque Padamsee's Begum Samroo, written by Partap Sharma where she played the lead role. I remember the play distinctly because Begum Samroo's first name was Farzana! Soon Tara was on Zee TV anchoring  a children's show, all of 52 episodes. After that UTV came along and she was on MTV doing a road show with Rahul Khanna. Then it was time for Bollywood, Sudhir Mishra's, Is Raat Ki Subah Nahi. In between the three years of Bollywood life Tara also nicked in for a beauty pageant and was one of the finalists along with Aishwarya Rai and Sushmita Sen but jaundice struck and she poor girl, landed up at Breach Candy Hospital instead of somewhere in the Universe!

But no issues, for she was soon to meet Mr Right, marry him and sort of settle down. Or so she thought. It was at a millennium-eve party that she met Daniel Tennebaum, an American Jew on a work trip to India. So well did the two hit it off that in three months they were engaged and married within the year. "In New York," says, Tara with a big grin, "It was a church wedding and I was wearing a white ghagra with a bustier!" But back in Bombay where there was another wedding reception, Maharashtrian style, she wore flaming saffron and gold saree.

Married life began for Tara in Boston where Daniel got into a business school. Home alone from 7.00 am to 7.00 pm, she knew she had to do something to keep herself engaged or go bonkers. As luck would have it she came across an advertisement in the papers where the Cambridge Community Centre was looking for someone to teach Indian cooking. Just up her street.

All her past learning helped and soon she was giving classes to enthusiastic American women interested in learning to cook curries. "I have to say, they were one curious bunch and to keep one step ahead I had to constantly keep myself updated and so began my culinary research."  From 15 - 20 students in Boston, Tara went on to other cities and other centres; Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, Minneapolis among others.

Tara was taking bunches of keen students to the market, shopping for ingredients and then teaching them how to cook Indian food. "It was fairly hard work and I was paid just 10 dollars an hour!" Then one day, some women from her cookery class asked Tara if she would cook something for them. And Tara, said, why not?
Turning point, that. From cooking by herself in her home kitchen and sending out a tiffin for a family Tara ended up with catering for a wedding of 3,500 people with a staff of 45! With a separate commercial kitchen, her own vans for delivery! The 10-dollars-an-hour situation changed, it was time for big bucks now! And Daniel joined her in her business.

"I had gone beyond cooking Indian, now we were catering to whatever cuisine that was asked of us. It was fun, but it came with its share of nightmares. Crazy experiences. Like at one party which was getting over by 3.00 am, there were drunk guests throwing bottles all around! Another time a marriage was called off on the eve of D-Day! Actually that happened three times in all. We got compensated but it was harrowing. Another time we were catering to a camp in Massachusetts. Outdoor dinner, we were told. Turned out it was one and a half kilometre away from the kitchen, on a hilly terrain. To top it, it started to rain! Yet another wedding, the bride insisted on an outdoor dinner in spite of a remnant of a tornado warning. Yup, the wind and rain both came along, tents flew off, tables and chairs got sunk in the mud and steaks turned into meat soup!" Tara couldn't stop laughing at all the erratica!

But the best story was what she and Daniel refer to as the "Filet Mignon Wedding".  It was an order for a sit down dinner for 160 people. Says Tara, "I was all prepared. I had about 175 steaks sitting there in the dishes, when a relative of the groom passes by and points out that the steaks did not appear to Fillet Mignon. I panicked. Americans are very sticky about their steaks and I had a rep to protect. So immediately I placed an emergency order for another 170 steaks which fortunately landed up in time. Except I saw that it looked absolutely the same as what I had! That lunatic pulled a fast one on me!"

Never mind, Tara had one happy neighbourhood after this incident. For what Tara and Daniel did was bring back the raw steaks to their home in Boston and distribute it to all their neighbours! Well from catering, which also included setting up the infrastructure, the décor and so on, Tara graduated to baking the wedding cakes and even doing the floral arrangements. She armed herself with as many as 12 professional certificate courses from Le Cordon Bleu in London, Paris and New York. She also studied at the French Culinary Institute in New York which is now re-named International Culinary Education. But such is life that after establishing a roaring business it was time for Tara to head back home to India. For Daniel, being a hedge fund manager handling public equities, had made serious inroads in the Indian scenario and needed to be here. Tara was only too happy. So the two sold off the business and came back to India.

Tara of course is entrenched in the world of food, writing yet another book (she has written four), writing food columns for newspapers and magazines, doing pop-ups and also busy setting up a culinary studio. Her quest for new cuisines, took her to Seoul, Korea from where she has recently  returned armed with some terrific recipes which she rustled up in her kitchen especially for UpperCrust. Try them out, they lend perfectly to our taste.

There is Japchae, a dish whose origins go back to the 16th century. Jap means vegetable and Chae means mix (Chop Suey is a corruption of this term). The veggies are cut thin and long and the noodles have to be made from sweet potatoes only. Not spicy, it has a delicate, mellow flavour. Bibimbap an extremely popular dish worldwide, includes a bowl of warm rice mixed with namul (sautéed vegetables), soy sauce and doeenjang (fermented soy bean paste) and is always accompanied by Goghu-Jang, Korea's most famous chilli sauce. Check out the recipes in the section at the back, but a word of advise. Don't get into a spin trying to recreate Korea's signature dish, the khimchi. Seems simple but far from it. You have to be a Khimchi Master to get it right!