If you’ve had a hometown dish while abroad, you might have thought, It’s just not the same here. But missing familiar cooking goes beyond simple food cravings. It’s also a way of tapping national identity, according to Anita Mannur’s analysis of “the deep nostalgic investment in considering certain types of food to be authentically, and autochthonously, ‘Indian’” in fiction, memoir, and cookbook writing about South Asian immigrants’ gastronomic habits in North America.

Reading Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking, Sara Suleri’s memoir Meatless Days, and two short stories by Shani Mootoo, Mannur suggests that cooking lets immigrants