My babaji, my grandfather on my dad’s side, was from a village in Punjab, India. He would visit us in Pennsylvania for weeks at a time and taught me how to cook.  

We began with his favorite dish, eggplant and potatoes. Cut the eggplant into chunks. Don’t get rid of the woody end—you want to cook that, too, because the sweet flesh inside is delicious once cooked. He explained it in his Punjabi while I took it all in and worked with him at our butcher table which served as a cutting station and a counter. He added just a hint of turmeric powder and then the cumin seeds, garam masala, and onions, and ginger. 

As a young girl with things to do on the weekend, cooking with my grandfather was one of the last things I wanted to do on a Saturday afternoon. But that one lesson ignited my passion for cooking Indian food the way he loved it in his village—hot, spicy, and vibrant. 

He was known as the foodie in our family. And it’s because of this one lesson that I do what I do today. It’s this lesson and all of the stories about food and sourcing ingredients in our home in the U.S. that connected us all of those years to our roots in India. Sitting with my grandfather that day breaking off pieces of roti and using it as a spoon to scoop up morsels of the eggplant and potatoes, popping it into my mouth and chasing it with a piece of lemony crunchy onion helped me understand my grandfather way better than anything else we ever did together. No matter that he was from a small rural village and I was living outside of Philadelphia thousands of miles away. Food connected us. 

It’s this pride of culture through food that I wanted to share with my own girls. In 2009 I started working on a living breathing passion project to learn to cook every Indian recipe I grew up with, share it with my young girls, and see if I could convince them to prefer Indian food. I logged these experiments on my website Indian As Apple Pie and started to gather other family recipes and cooking techniques. That led to my first book The Indian Slow Cooker which led to three other books including my latest Instant Pot Indian and a line of Indian spices and sauces. My goal is to always preserve recipes and log taste profiles so that anyone can replicate them and pass them along. Those from outside of the Indian community love it because now they can successfully make their favorite dishes at home. But those in my community love it more because now they can pass on their food traditions to their kids even living outside of India. I always laugh that no one should have to give up their day job like I did to cook for their family. 

What matters is getting our food right, as I continue to learn from my own students in class, like the one I taught for the summer program in Leysin. 

It smells like my house! 

The little camper with dark unruly hair was making jeera chawal with me in the LAS test kitchen. He was proudly chatting to the other campers about the cumin seeds we were tempering in oil to spice the basmati rice. Another camper (who was Swiss and had never eaten Indian food before) was standing peering into the pot in full concentration focused on not burning the spices. We moved on to making dal from lentils and a potato and cauliflower stir fry. 

I realized sitting down to eat the meal we cooked with that group of students from all over the world, from Europe to Asia to America, that I was witnessing the power of food. There is something about the power of ingredients and the comfort of eating together that breaks uncomfortable barriers and has the power to bring people together. We can all understand good food. 

Follow Anupy at @indianasapplepie on Instagram or at indianasapplepie.com.