Telling your personal narrative through food is a common cookbook trope. Taking an anthropological wander through a peoples’ — or country’s — food culture is another prevailing cookbook methodology.

Less ubiquitous is an author who merges the two, swiveling a mirror to look at both themself and their ancestral background. Niloufer Ichaporia King’s 2007 masterpiece, “ My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking ,” might be the exemplar of this double-vision.

Parsis and global cooking

Across the book’s 300-plus pages, King tells the story of the Parsis, a group of Persians who practiced Zoroastrianism thousands of years ago and were persecuted after the Arab-Islamic conquest of Persia. As the persecuted often do, the Parsis fled. Many landed on the western coast of what

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