Cookbooks celebrate flavors from many cultures

Have you ever chosen a travel destination for its cuisine, perhaps New Orleans for beignets, Tokyo for sushi, or Milan for risotto? Food tourism has motivated scores of global travelers to push out into the unknown to experience “authentic” culture and history through local dishes. Cookbook authors have long targeted readers eager to re-create recipes from their travels.

But cuisines don’t have firm lines around them the way geopolitics does. Each new wave of arrivals to a place adds layers to a culture’s food. Flavors are adapted and blended. New cultural identities emerge as part of a messy, joyful process.

In the world of cookbooks, this trend is reflected in recent titles that sometimes tack on -ish to signal a collection of recipes that deftly tiptoes between cultural appropriatio