Spring cookbooks have arrived, and a number of them do more than simply get dinner on the table. These works launch explorations to distant lands, taking home cooks on journeys based on their taste buds and evocatively describing how landscape and culture create foodways.
 

• Tokyo Stories: A Japanese Cookbook by Tim Anderson; photos by Nassima Rothacker (Hardie Grant).
  Japan's capital city is a culinary must-visit. Here, Anderson guides cooks on a giddy and exhaustive tour through its many different gastronomic byways, from fast food sold in subway stations to high-end sushi to the joys of ramen.
   
• The Turkish Cookbook by Musa Dağdeviren (Phaidon).
  Showcased on Netflix’s Chef’s Table, Dağdeviren investigates the extensive world of Turkish food with 500 recipes featured in a book that is designed to be a core title: encyclopedic and authoritative.
   
• Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes, Through Darkness and Light by Caroline Eden (Quadrille).
  Travel/food writer Eden leads readers along the Black Sea, centrally to Odessa, Trabzon, and Istanbul in this story-rich, highly narrative cookbook that is slightly more travel essays than a collection of recipes.
   
• Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen by Yasmin Khan (Norton).
  Stories, history, and politics combine in Khan's tour of Palestinian cuisine, with dishes ranging from dips to desserts organized into menu plans that encompass easy dinners to seasonal celebrations.
   
• Food of the Italian South: Recipes for Classic, Disappearing, and Lost Dishes by Katie Parla (Clarkson Potter: Crown).
  The ever-popular Parla returns with a new look at Italian cooking, this time probling the less well-traveled south end of the country and its particular culinary traditions—including the origins of Italian wedding soup.