Exploring the food world: How cooking classes helped home chefs grow

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

cooking classes she took after getting married were fun. They were taught by a jolly lady named Mumtaz Currim and, after she demonstrated the recipes, they ate the results. But she also recalls fights because some participants felt that their fees entitled them to take food home for their families.

A new film about Tarla Dalal shows how the cookbook author and TV host started by giving cooking classes, which led to her first book, and wider success. Others have also taken this route, mostly women who used home cooking classes to break into a wider food world otherwise dominated by professional chefs. In Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers, a study of seven immigrant women who made a mark on the US food world, cooking classes are a common gateway.

One subject, Julie Sahni, was taking classes herself, in Chinese cooking, when her instructors started asking about differences from Indian food: “Everyone was struck by the direct way Julie described these distinctions when asked. They suggested Julie teach cooking herself.” When Balwant Kaur’s husband, Balbir Singh, went to the UK for his PhD, she went along and took domestic science classes where she learned how to translate andaaz-style Indian recipes into precise measurements. According to an article by Aditya Iyer, when they returned to India in 1955, she started teaching cooking at Lady Irwin College, and then at her home.

This led to Mrs Balbir Singh’s Indian Cookery (1961, published by Mills & Boon!) and early TV cooking demonstrations on Doordarshan. Cooking classes give those who conduct them confidence and the ability to break a recipe into easily explained steps. But they must also learn to deal with disruptive students like the ones my mother encountered.