Panang curry is a red Thai curry thick with coconut milk and stained a warm orange-red. It’s sweet, salty and spicy, and it’s a dish that Franklin’s Sweet Basil makes particularly well. While it’s also found in many Thai restaurants, in Vanna Praseutsack’s family, it’s what has enabled them to plant roots and fulfill the goal of owning a restaurant that they’d set long ago. The dish started with a 13-year-old girl. That was the age Praseutsack was when she came to the United States from Thailand. When she and her parents arrived, they “didn’t speak a lick of English. They didn’t really know anything about America. They didn’t really know anything about anything,” says Praseutsack’s daughter, Victoria Sithy. Cooking was their solace, their keepsake. Praseutsack’s mother passed down the traditions to her daughter. It evolved from them cooking for themselves to “making these meals to get out to neighbors. That was their way of making friends in the community. So they built connections in their neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee just by bartering food and bartering resources, and then our neighbors would bring them food, and that’s just kind of how they connected with people without words.” That exchange became a larger message of “treating everyone like family, welcoming people, building that friendship off of just food alone,” Sithy says. Now, with Sweet Basil, Praseutsack, her husband and her kids are carrying on a family legacy. And the two dishes shared here are an important part of that. They are among Praseutsack’s favorite recipes from her childhood.

The curry is “one of those recipes you can make and feed a large group, and it’s warm and comforting, and you can make it with very simple, very cheap ingredients like potatoes and vegetables from the garden,” Sithy says.