Jasleen Kaur (b. 1986, Glasgow Scotland) is a Scottish-Indian multidisciplinary artist and designer based in London. Brought up in a Sikh household in Glasgow, Kaur’s work explores the malleability of culture and the layering of social histories within the world that surrounds us.

In line with her practice of taking apart existing objects and configuring them to describe connections between composite parts, Kaur reworked a 1920s Cook’s Measure by the British manufacturer of cooking utensils and homeware, Tala. Kaur was always fascinated by how members of her family effortlessly measured ingredients for Indian dishes by adding a pinch of this and a handful of that. Inspired by the original Tala measure’s purpose of providing easy instructions for measuring ingredients, Jasleen wondered if that same approach be applied to encourage intuitive cooking of curry dishes by eye. Kaur describes her personal experience with these dishes as ‘a notion of something; it wasn’t mills and grams… it was a way of knowing’.

The Tala Curry Measure points to animportant story of Indian and British culture and history. The commercial success of the Tala Curry Measure attests to the role curry played in British gastronomic culture, from the adaptation of curry recipes by memsahibs (middle-class white women living in colonial India) for popular Victorian periodicals, to ex-foreign secretary Robin Cook ‘s 2011 declaration of Tikka Masala as a ‘true British national dish’ by reflecting Britain’s plural identity. Jasleen Kaur’s Tala Curry Measure encodes a plural history of diasporic identity and cultural assimilation through a British cooking utensil which has been reworked for a cuisine itself both Indian and British.