Arts & Entertainment
In New Cooking Show, Anupy Singla Makes Indian Cuisine Accessible to Home Cooks
Anupy Singla built her career on storytelling, working as a broadcast journalist before shifting to documenting her family’s recipes and making Indian food accessible to a larger audience.
After the success of her first cookbook, her brand Indian as Apple Pie took off.
Singla’s show of the same name recently premiered on WTTW. In it, she demonstrates the basics of Indian cooking and brings “the essence of Indian cooking to the American public.” While Indian food is one of the most popular cuisines in the United States, that’s not represented in American kitchens as it’s still perceived by many as being too challenging to make at home and best enjoyed at restaurants.
“When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, people didn’t really know what Indian food was,” Singla said. “There weren’t a lot of grocery stores; there weren’t a lot of places to get ingredients, so I think the best part of the process and journey for me is people really warm up to Indian food now. Growing up, I kind of had to hide it from other people, I was embarrassed by it.”
Singla and her family moved from Punjab, India, to suburban Pennsylvania when she was 3 years old. She said she grew up feeling neither “Indian enough” nor totally accepted in American culture.
She was able to connect more deeply with her heritage, however, through cooking lessons with her grandfather. He’d “travel hundreds of miles and bring recipes back,” Singla said, making her fall in love with the process of finding the right spices and flavor profiles for a dish.
“I have a choice to take the best of both worlds — the best of India, the best of America and put it together,” Singla said. “I think that’s the beauty of being an immigrant. I love it.”
“Indian as Apple Pie” is filmed in Singla’s home kitchen in Lincoln Park. Episodes air Saturdays at 4 p.m. on WTTW.
