One great cookbook: 'I Am From Here' by Vishwesh Bhatt

It is a curious, invigorating effect of migration patterns when familiar ingredients appear in a new destination. This occurrence is the lifeblood of Vishwesh Bhatt's cooking and the gold vein of his cookbook, "I Am From Here: Stories and Recipes from a Southern Chef."

Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the Indian state of Gujarat. He moved to the American South when he was 18 and eventually started cooking in restaurants. The crossover between the ingredients of his childhood in India and those of his new home was prominent, a source of inspiration for both his home cooking and his work as chef of Snackbar in Oxford, Mississippi. "I Am From Here" is the delightful, scrutable result.

16 ingredients, spun into Indo-American treasure

Rice; peas and beans; okra; tomatoes; eggplant; corn; potatoes and sweet potatoes; peanuts; greens; shrimp; catfish; chicken; pork and lamb: Scouring the book's chapter list, a compendium of ingredients around which the recipes and tales in "I Am From Here" are organized, you might peg the items' Southernness. Or their Indian resonances. You would be correct on both counts.

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Take okra. Bhatt pickles the pods two ways: One is a prototypical take on the pickled okra of the American Deep South, sharp with two kinds of vinegar and heady with dill and hot sauce. The other is an Indian pickle, punchy with mustard seed oil and bittersweet from the maple syrup-like edge of fenugreek seeds. The two recipes honor the vegetable staple in similar and disparate manners.

Other recipes run India and the American South headlong into each other, like two bulls charging. Bhatt's peanut chaat harnesses a childhood fixture of his, boiled peanuts, views it through the lens of the roadside boiled peanut stands that pepper the roads of the South, and returns to India by treating the legume with the fresh, kicky seasoning of that popular North Indian snack genre called chaat.

Classics, reconsidered

Bhatt, like so many immigrants, is unafraid to fiddle. His fried chicken is a nod to the legendary fried chicken at Willie Mae's Scotch House in New Orleans, but Bhatt brines his with sweet tea. So very Southern.

Sweet potato pie is waved in front of a funhouse mirror, the reflection a sweet potato turnover lissome with cardamom and a collision of black pepper shards. Basmati rice pudding is turned savory with the addition of tomato, basil, Parmesan, corn and parsley. Black-eyed peas are ground and seasoned with chiles, cumin, cilantro and mint, then griddled and served with bacon rashers. An optimal breakfast that hints at two continents.

The recipe's instructions are clear-eyed; Bhatt's warm tales of his childhood in Ahmedabad and his always-growing community of chefs, purveyors and pals across the South are winning. "I Am From Here" is a book that inspires nearly as much outside the kitchen as inside it.