This piece originally appeared in SAVEUR’s Spring/Summer 2025 issue. See more stories from Issue 204 here.

The embrace of intersectional identities flows through a handful of 2025 cookbook titles. In Salt Sugar MSG, Calvin Eng recounts his childhood yearning to be “more American,” only fully claiming his Cantonese American culture through cooking. In Family Style, Peter Som serves up large-format Chinese cooking with a global spin that nods to his Bay Area upbringing, with dishes like cacio e pepe sticky rice and sole meunière with fish sauce. Zaynab Issa’s Third Culture Cooking draws from her own East African and South Asian heritage—among others—a reminder that American food belongs to no single country. In Kin, Marie Mitchell engages with her ancestry through the complex history of Caribbean cuisine, calling what we cook and eat “the purest form of legacy.” And throughout In the Kusina, Woldy Reyes uses the foods of the Philippines to find his proudly queer, first-generation voice. 

Like Wright-Ruiz, these authors redefine the need to prove one’s worth by performing “authenticity”—a trope that once governed diasporic cookbooks. Despite attempts to encapsulate the cuisines of an entire nation—look no further than Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) or Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973)—food is seldom so neatly categorized. After encyclopedic treatments on national foodways caught the public’s eye, subsequent titles explored regional overlaps fueled by centuries of global migrations: In 1989, Ken Hom shared Hong Kong’s east-meets-west cuisine in Fragrant Harbor Taste; in 1996, Annabel Doling documented Portuguese influence on Macanese cooking in Macau on a Plate; and in 1998, Joyce Goldstein published Cucina Ebraica on the subculture of Jews in Rome, to name a few. 

Today’s new wave takes a different approach, excavating present-day diasporic identity from the inside out. This is the golden age of the culinary -ish, in which food comes not from one narrow origin story but from many all at once. As Soleil Ho, co-author to chef Tu David Phu of the Viet American The Memory of Taste (2024), says, “We’re living in a time of narrative plentitude, where there’s no longer just ‘the one’ representative cookbook.” Rejecting monolithic notions of the immigrant experience, each volume, full of specific details, histories, and personal touches, reminds us that the diasporic cookbook is not a formula but rather a canon containing multitudes. 

Recent books also shake up national culinary narratives, redefining “American” cuisine and who gets to decide what constitutes it. Khushbu Shah says her book Amrikan (2024) was conceived as a framework for understanding the Indian diaspora in this country. “There are so many ways you can be Indian in America, and now there’s finally space for people to put out their own experiences.” By “Indian-izing” dishes commonly considered American, such as makhani-style mac and cheese and paneer burgers, Shah myth-busts the exoticism so often assigned to South Asian dishes, offering a fresh take on Indian American cooking. 

Flipping the authenticity script has, in recent years, become a successful formula for diasporic cookbooks. In Indian-ish (2019), Priya Krishna shares a dialogue with her mother, echoing inter-generational debates around cooking found in countless diasporic households; the accompanying recipes are Krishna family favorites rather than a representation of an entire cuisine. When cookbooks are anchored in personal narrative, authors wield the freedom to blend cultures, techniques, and ingredients. In Frankie Gaw’s First Generation (2022), a burger recipe is inspired by McDonald’s Big Macs and Chinese lion’s head meatballs—two tastes, he writes, “divided no more.” A book like this one, Gaw posits, which depicts his first-generation Taiwanese American experience, must showcase an identity “that exists in the in-between.” Marisel Salazar echoes this sentiment in Latin-ish (2024). As a “third-culture kid,” one who grew up in a different culture than her parents’, Salazar cites multiple culinary origin stories from across Latin America. “Recipes change,” she writes, “because over time, locations, circumstances, ingredients, and people change.” 

And as cultural identities overlap, authors can explore intersectionality in other realms as well. In Filipinx (2021), chef and activist Angela Dimayuga writes about how their queerness is a key ingredient for decolonizing and degendering cuisine and culture. But Dimayuga’s recipes, filtered through the chef’s own professional background, still honor the “cooking by feeling” approach of their elders. Tradition and progress aren’t at odds, Dimayuga suggests, if a cook’s aim is to celebrate their own heritage in its fullest form.

While these cookbooks are anchored in the present, many authors are also quick to recognize the importance of the past. In Korean American (2022), Eric Kim describes his mother’s sohn mat, or “hand taste,” an embodied knowledge of food that he endeavors to translate into conventional recipes. Yet Kim makes space for his Korean heritage in all of his dishes: As his recipe for gim pasta shows, a package of roasted seaweed can be both a tether to family history and a secret weapon for enhancing a bowl of bucatini. In purposefully adding an -ish to their own story, a food writer can redefine both themselves and their cooking. 

Being half-something or something-ish is a story worth telling, and this season’s debuts tell stories that are specific, uncompromising, and generous. In response to the reductive “Where are you from?” these authors remind us that food can pay tribute to several threads of identity at once. As Wright-Ruiz observes at the close of her book, “In the process of being half, I’ve found out I’ve been whole this whole time.”