On the Himalayan Trail (2022)

If your idea of northern Indian food is Punjabi, this is the corrective. Romy Gill's book covers Kashmir and Ladakh in more than 80 recipes: gustaba, lamb meatballs cooked in a yogurt gravy; wagen pakora, eggplant fried in gram flour; and kanguch yakhni, morels in a spiced gravy. Travel photography and the life and history of the Kashmiri and Ladakhi people run through it, and that context explains dishes most general Indian cookbooks give a single page or skip entirely. It won the 2023 IACP award for culinary travel.