This Book Explores Some of the Most Famous Dishes Around the World — and Why They're Worth Traveling For

“National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home,” by Anya von Bremzen comes out on June 20.

Food and travel writer Anya von Bremzen is well-known in culinary circles for her richly researched cookbooks, including a seminal volume on recipes of the Soviet Union. But in “National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home,” she takes a wider view, touching down in places such as Tokyo, Paris, and Naples, Italy, in search of quintessential dishes that define a place, whether that’s a bowl of ramen or the perfect, just-blistered-at-the-edge pizza. The Penguin Press–published book hit shelves on June 20.

“Nations and their cuisines are a lot more complex — and fascinatingly so — than we could ever imagine,” von Bremzen observes, in an interview with Travel + Leisure. Her book, an engaging blend of memoir and culinary history, is a celebration of satisfying food, an examination of how certain meals become part of a country’s identity. “Never have we been more cosmopolitan about what we eat — and yet never more essentialist, locavore, and particularist,” she notes.

The second half of the deeply researched book sees von Bremzen head for Oaxaca, Mexico, and Seville, Spain — as well as her part-time home in Istanbul, where she finds inspiration in the “edible memoryscapes” of Ottoman cuisine.

The engrossing book ends with a melancholic epilogue, on the history and meaning of borsch. “I had a different epilogue planned for the book,” von Bremzen tells T+L, before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. “Amid all the crying and adrenalized doom scrolling,” she adds, “I suddenly realized that, after all these years of investigating national cuisines and identities, I no longer knew how to think or talk about borsch, a super-traditional beet soup which both Ukraine and Russia claimed as profoundly their own, a soup that my mom made almost daily when we were living in Moscow.”

It, too, is a fascinating reflection on the connection between food, place, and what flavors mean to the people who prepare them and those who travel to seek them out. “It’s a chapter I wish I didn’t have to write, brought about by such wrenching circumstances,” the author says. “But as I worked on it, it really brought home in a deeply intimate way what food means to identity.”

“National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home,” published by Penguin Press, comes out on June 20. It’s available for $30 on Amazon.com and at local bookstores across the country.

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