A Scouse nurse who "embraced" her culture by becoming a TikTok star with 175,000 of followers shared her favourite Diwali sweets for the Hindu festival of lights.
Rene Subash, 23, has cooked as long as she can remember, watching her mum and nan make food as a kid. During lockdown, she started posting photos and videos on Instagram to take her mind off work. She said: "I think my friends were getting fed up of seeing me post all the food pictures on my actual Instagram account, so I started a different page and started posting them. It all just started from there really."
Now Rene, who posts as @renes.cravings, shares her cooking with more than 50k followers on Instagram and 175k on TikTok, and she's currently doing this full-time while taking a break from work. Making the videos, many of which show the diversity of Indian food beyond the classic butter chicken, has helped her embrace her identity and culture, which she struggled with after moving to Liverpool from Bangalore, a city in southern India, when she was five.
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She told the ECHO: "It was quite hard getting used to the change and getting used to this new environment. It was quite hard, and I think I used to be quite ashamed of being Indian when I was younger because I just wanted to fit in with everyone around me.
"Now I'm older, and with the people who are around me right now, like Liverpool is so culturally diverse, everyone is so welcoming that don't think like that at all anymore. Starting to post the cooking videos online definitely helped me embrace my culture because I share a lot of Indian recipes, and seeing how other people relate to the stories I tell and try out new recipes I post made me understand people are much more understanding then I thought they were."
Rene added: "Nothing makes me happier than when I get a message saying, 'I was really intimidated to cook, but I tried one of your recipes and it came out really amazing'. That makes me feel so nice, and I love having friends over and actually feeding people."
In the lead up to Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, celebrated this year on Monday, October 24, Rene posted a series of videos with Diwali sweets like kaju katli ice cream, mango peda, and one of her all-time favourites, gulab jamun, "a fried dough soaked in a sugar syrup"
Rene said: "Diwali is known as the festival of lights. One of the main ways people celebrate it is by giving each other sweets - it's called 'mithai'. Each family usually has their own recipes for sweets, and when you see your friends or when anyone comes over, you give them mithai for Diwali."
The sweets, like rasmalai flavoured with pistachio, cardamom and saffron, are particularly nostalgic for Rene, whose family would buy their sweets from a sweet shop near their house in Bangalore. She said: "I'd love people to know that Diwali is a celebration of just bringing everyone together, of new beginnings and just a lot of sweetness."
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