In the ’80s and ’90s, rare was an urban Indian home that did not have at least one Tarla Dalal cookbook. At the time — when we were decades away from MasterChef, and foodgasm had not earned a place in our vocabulary — the chef-food writer dominated the Indian food scene with her multiple cookbooks and culinary shows. Now, the late Dalal’s journey will be retold in a biopic to be headlined by Huma Qureshi. We hear Ronnie Screwvala, Nitesh and Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari will jointly back the biopic, which will be helmed by the filmmaker couple’s associate Piyush Gupta.

Dalal reportedly authored 170 books