National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home

Named a Best Book of 2023 by Financial Times, The Guardian, and BBC's The Food Programme

In this engrossing and timely journey to the crossroads of food and identity, award-winning writer Anya von Bremzen explores six of the world’s most fascinating and iconic culinary cultures—France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey—brilliantly weaving cuisine, history, and politics into a work of scintillating connoisseurship and charm

We all have an idea in our heads about what French food is—or Italian, or Japanese, or Mexican, or . . .  But where did those ideas come from? Who decides what makes a national food canon?  Anya von Bremzen has won three James Beard Awards and written several definitive cookbooks, as well as her internationally acclaimed memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. In National Dish, she investigates the truth behind the eternal cliché—“we are what we eat”—traveling to six storied food capitals, going high and low, from world-famous chefs to culinary scholars to strangers in bars, in search of how cuisine became connected to place and identity.

A unique and magical cook’s tour of the world, National Dish brings us to a deep appreciation of how the country makes the food, and the food the country.