Cooking Tales
(2023-2024)

Cooking Tales was a project started in July 2022 by Gauri Raje, a storyteller based in Argyll, Scotland, as a way of documenting innovations to cooking that South Asian migrant women had to create when there were few South Asian ingredients available in Glasgow in the 1950s. For this project, she approached and collaborated with Sonja Blietschau, photographer based in Falkirk and the Scottish Asian Ekta group - a group of elderly South Asian women who are widows who meet weekly in Glasgow.

The aim of the project was to honour and give voice to the creativity of South Asian women, who did not have accessibility to make a mark in public in Scottish civic life. Their stories are rarely heard since they are regarded as ‘housewives’. In trying to understand how they adapted to and incorporated Scottish ingredients and cooking practices in Scotland, Cooking Tales project was trying to give voice to the South Asian women migrants’ story and the history of their life in Scotland.

This project won the ‘Spirit of Scotland 2023’ award for the best charity project for the Scottish Asian Awards.

Photo credits: Sonja Blietschau & Jasami Publishing
Video credit: Jasami Publishing