Delicious Memories

How family recipes connect past and future generations

Fact checked by Shannon Sparks

Anupy Singla has a potato curry that she makes with one standout ingredient: yellow raisins. 

She learned about yellow raisins from her dad, as she was writing the recipe for the curry. Her dad remembered that in the village where he was raised, Bhikhi, deep in the Indian state of Punjab, they put yellow raisins in their rasawala aloo.

“It’s so special, like I never would have imagined, but they do a lot of that pairing of the sweet notes with the savory, and it is so good — just that little, tiny idea of the raisins,” Singla says. “It just made that curry into something really special. And that was him putting his story behind the recipe and his slant on that dish for me.” 

Born in Chandigarh, India and raised in suburban Philadelphia, Singla now lives in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. She traces her love for food to her paternal grandfather, who had a passion for curries and spices. He was the one who taught her to cook, showing her how to put spices together and how to create great Indian food. 

She remembers a dearth of Indian grocery stores in the United States as she grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, and how her family would pack Indian spices in their suitcases to bring home after visits to India. She remembers eating her mom’s Indian cooking every night, how her mom would sprinkle cumin seeds onto spaghetti.  

“It was this connection to the food that got our immigrant family through the ups and the downs,” Singla says. “No matter how much you would argue in a day, how many ups and downs there were, you’d always come together at the end of the day over really good Indian food.” 

Singla’s parents cultivated in her a love for Indian dishes — a self-described obsession, even — which led Singla to replicate recipes and to pass them on to her two daughters. In doing so, she wrote an Indian cookbook from an American perspective, followed by three more. Singla also started a company called Indian as Apple Pie, which offers Indian spices, recipes, classes, and more.  

Passing on her recipes has been a powerful connector, for her daughters and their friends, as well as people who have never tried Indian food. It’s especially poignant, Singla says, when flavors and recipes get passed from generation to generation.

“For the older generation, it’s a way to see that their culture and their food memories are living on, and that their children and their grandchildren appreciate it,” she says. “For my parents, it means the world to know that their kids and grandkids love Indian food.” 

Matthew Rutherford, curator of genealogy and local history at the Newberry Library, calls food “sensual, collaborative, and transitive,” adding that it has “tremendous power to connect us across lands and generations, and to anchor us to the past, in a good way.”

Because all people have to eat, food occupies a lot of our attention and carries emotional, mental, physical, and even spiritual associations and memories. “Think of how many of us have family favorites or childhood favorites that are passed down from generation to generation,” Rutherford says. “And think how often when we are preparing these dishes, or eating them, we are conscious of family members, with us or not, living or not, who also ate these dishes.”

Rutherford recalls that in his own family, his mom tended to serve as the main cook, with several of her recipes coming from her mother. He eventually learned that those recipes came from the Pennsylvanian German region and likely Germany before that. He cited his grandma’s Waldorf salad recipe — with whipped cream added — as his favorite because he says it’s fresh, fun, and “reminds me of some of the happiest times of my childhood.” 

Even more, Rutherford says these dishes help him lean into his family’s past. He sometimes imagines his great-great grandparents eating the same pickled eggs he learned to cook from his mom, the food connecting him to people who are no longer here.

“Food is family in physical form and can link us even to people we’ve never known personally,” he says. “And [it] can build bridges, links, associations, with new, younger generations.”

Now that Rutherford’s mother has passed away, he says he loves to cook her candied sweet potatoes, pickled eggs, and creamed spinach. “The act of cooking them, let alone eating them, makes me feel close to her, recalling the cooking tips she gave, the care she took in feeding our family, and the joyous meals and conversation around the dinner table we shared.”

No matter where a recipe comes from, it carries power beyond its nutritional sustenance: memories, connection, and love.

Originally published in the Winter/Spring 2025 print issue