Family Hospitality and Ethnic Tradition Among South Asian Women in the West of Scotland

This chapter conforms to the theme of the volume in that its primary focus is the exploration of an Asian cuisine in a European city. ¹ It differs, however, in that this exploration is facilitated by a comparison with a second, non-Asian cuisine, that of Italy. Specifically, we describe the food choice of South Asian (i.e. with a direct line of descent from the Indian sub-continent) and Italian women living in Glasgow (West of Scotland). In the course of investigating factors which shaped their food choice in hospitality, we found the most important factors to be closely related to the construction of ethnic identity.