This piece originally appeared in SAVEUR’s Spring/Summer 2026 issue. See more stories from Issue 206.

These fights often concern cuisines that rarely see the spotlight. Many cookbook publishers insist such topics don’t sell, and while celebrity chefs and the diet du jour still dominate bestseller lists, this past season ushered in a wave of new titles immersed in the cuisines of Somalia, Sudan, Cambodia, Pakistan, and El Salvador, to name a few.

Some of these titles have been written by first-­generation ­immigrants. Several are the first-ever cookbooks to be published in English about their respective cuisines, or are among the few known to exist. All include painstakingly recreated recipes. More than just cookbooks, these projects are important works of cultural preservation.

“I have a responsibility to share my culture and this ­cuisine—and a real sense of not wanting this knowledge to be lost,” says Ifrah F. Ahmed, author of Soomaaliya. Ahmed was born in Mogadishu and came to the United States as a refugee in 1996. Her book—only the third to be published on Somali cuisine since 1978—provides a detailed overview of her home country’s history, pays homage to the chefs and writers who came before her, and intersperses thoroughly researched essays about the Somali diaspora.

In My Cambodia, San Francisco-based chef Nite Yun recalls how hard it was to find Khmer cooking resources when she first took to the kitchen. Her book weaves together her own personal, often painful memories of assimilating to life in California with unapologetic renditions of the dishes that brought her closer to her family. She refuses to simplify Cambodian cuisine for American palates. Explaining the importance of kroeung (lemongrass paste) and prahok (fermented fish paste): “If you don’t have [them] when a recipe calls for it,” she writes, “I highly suggest cooking another dish.”

These projects often cross the line from cookbook to ­ethnography, buoyed by shoe-leather reporting overseas. “After a couple of years of looking for—and cooking from—recipes online, I began to hit a wall,” writes Maryam Jillani in Pakistan. “I kept finding the same Pakistani recipes over and over again…There was little to no coverage of the dozens of regional culinary traditions I had encountered during my travels.” So Jillani took matters into her own hands, exploring her home country to learn from the chefs and home cooks who are credited throughout.

Karla Tatiana Vasquez employed a similar ­community-​driven approach in her 2024 cookbook SalviSoul, which doubles as a narrative history featuring candid interviews with 25 Salvadoran women who contributed their own recipes to the project. And Omer Al Tijani, in his groundbreaking book The Sudanese Kitchen (the first Sudanese cookbook printed in English), relied on dozens of local guides, extended family members, and on-the-ground fixers during his decade-long quest to document the nation’s foodways. Part of his motivation, he writes, was to shift the widespread (and reductive) narrative of Sudan as a “troubled” nation. Instead, he honors his home country’s multicultural culinary influences, which he compellingly argues “provide ­substantial ­contributions to the art of global gastronomy.”

Celebrity and diet cookbooks aren’t going away. But the emergence of these overdue ethnographies speaks to a growing demand from readers for books that dig deep, uncovering stories that rarely get told. The fights to publish them are well worth it.