Coming in from trick-or-treating, our cheeks flushed from the brisk autumn evening, we smell dinner being kept warm on the stove. The fragrance—cumin, jalapeño, and a dash of cinnamon—wraps me up in memories and grief, reminding me of both home and death. Tastebuds do not experience such complex emotions. My mouth waters as I pour a glass of wine in a Ghostface goblet. Each Halloween, I make a big pot of chili, using a recipe handed down to me by my father, because October 31st was his birthday.
That food can evoke strong memories lays the foundation for great meals and how we understand their role in our homes. From Proust to Ratatouille, the image of a dish transporting a person back to their childhood resonates viscerally. Memory, however, is not the constant that it seems to be, instead shifting and fading, blurring with dreams or hearsay until, no matter how certain we are that our memories are accurate, it is hard to know for sure. Our memories change as we change. Like substitutions to a recipe, details shift, but what we remember, we think we know as truth.
Five years ago, when my father died unexpectedly, I felt disoriented for all the obvious reasons, but the silencing of the loudest voice in my life was particularly unsettling. Dad as I remembered him would be frozen in time. No new experiences. Just the old ones slowly degrading, subtly shifting. I discovered that I had to hold the truth of my own memory of him.
To cope, I turned into an archivist. I preserved any trace of Dad I had in messages, emails, texts, and photos. I digitized family videos and downloaded his Goodreads and Strava accounts, creating backed-up versions before his digital existence vanished. In an email, I found his chili recipe, which I asked for almost a decade earlier. I imagine that on an autumn day, living alone in my first apartment, I craved Dad’s Chili and wanted to make it myself. He sent the recipe, with a note warning that a pot, “Feeds an army and will light up a room…be careful not to make it too spicy.”
Everyone needs a go-to recipe for the snowy evenings when ordering delivery feels inconsiderate or bad days when cooking feels like too much effort but a home-cooked meal is still emotionally necessary. For me, that recipe became Dad’s chili. It is nothing fancy, and the only real work is chopping an onion and mincing garlic.
Before I ever requested the chili recipe, I inherited Dad’s tendency to cook without one. I read cookbooks and food blogs, looking for new dishes to try, but once I have cooked a recipe once or twice, I generally continue to make the dish freestyle. Working from memory, I approximate, not measuring much to get away with dirtying as few dishes as possible. When I add the spices to Dad’s Chili, I am never sure exactly how much goes in—a few hearty shakes of chili powder, some cumin, a little onion powder, a few dashes of cinnamon, and red pepper flakes. Maybe Garam Masala if I want to mix things up.
As I opened the email in which Dad sent the recipe, my eyes scanned the ingredients. I knew I had deliberately made some adjustments, using veggie crumbles instead of meat, for example. But I was surprised by the other ways that the recipe had morphed in my kitchen. The proportions of beans and tomatoes were different. Over time, I stopped adding brown sugar as Dad did. Essentially, I transformed Dad's Chili into Kasey’s Chili. The two dishes have a family resemblance, but the second generation is vegetarian and a little spicier.
If we are fortunate, our parents teach us what they know about how to live, implicitly or on purpose, and then we go out into the world and make that knowledge our own. For many of us, cooking and eating are among the first steps to that independent adulthood. If we stop and think about it, most of us can trace ways, for good or ill, that our parents show up in our personalities—and in our kitchens—whether we follow their recipes or toss them out entirely.
In the months after Dad's death, I felt stuck under the weight of memory. I questioned if some revisions happened, stories softened, and elegies touted inflated virtues. I wondered if, recalling some of his best stories, I was getting details wrong. When I read the chili recipe and found that I had misremembered—had been preparing my version for years and still calling it his—I realized it did not matter. The changes to the chili did not undermine the connection I felt, had always felt, when preparing it. No one would call me out for my substitutions, and the result was still delicious. I am grateful to have an archive of Dad stored away, but the memories, like the recipe, are mine to use how and when I need them.