India’s first celebrity chef Jiggs Kalra and the recipes that made him a pioneer

The late Jiggs Kalra, who died in 2019 and whose full name was Jaspal Inder Singh Kalra, was a great promoter of Indian cuisine. He started his career as a journalist and that morphed into food writing, which then led to consulting for restaurants and hotels, writing cookbooks and hosting television programmes, including Daawat (“Banquet”).

The recipes Kalra presented on the show were not his own; rather, he invited chefs from all over India to “showcase the fabulous culinary heritage of India”, writes Pushpesh Pant in the long but entertaining introduction to Jiggs Kalra’s Daawat: The Television Series (2001). Pant, an Indian academic (in international relations and other subjects), television producer and historian who has written several cookbooks of his own (including 2010’s India: The Cookbook and 2018’s The Indian Vegetarian Cookbook), worked with Kalra on Daawat, which aired in 1991 over 32 episodes showing four recipes at a time.

It wasn’t easy being the pioneer of India’s first cooking show, as Pant writes in the book. “For Jiggs, this [television programme] was the natural sequel to his magnum opus, Prashad [1986], that in print had arranged a wonderful encounter with Indian cooking masters for thousands of readers at home and abroad [...] For Pushpesh, familiar with the mise en scène of filmmaking, it was an exciting initiation into the world of mise en place. Both of us were well aware of the complexity of the task. Our work would have to pass the test of two disciplines – video infotainment and gastronomy.

“The crew assigned to us had to grapple with problems of its own. They were veterans of many a creative battle – tested and tried in recording ballets, talk shows, quizzes and live OBs [outdoor broadcasts], plays, serials, and national programmes of music, but were strangers to the world of golden hued sautéed onions and aromatically crackling cumin seeds. They voiced their apprehensions candidly – on this show food was the star.

“The cameras had to be positioned accordingly. Ditto for mikes to catch the fleeting sizzle and bubbling boil. How to balance this with the sparkle in the eyes of the peppy anchor and the magic fingers of the dexterous craftsmen?