IN RECENT YEARS cookbook publishers have borrowed a page from restaurant designers, who've long understood that the true appeal of a restaurant is emotional, subliminal, holistic. The food is relevant, yes, but you like and remember a restaurant because of the details you're not necessarily aware of: the lighting, the sheen on the wood floors, the placement of flowers, the attitude of the staff. These qualities combined make a successful restaurant greater than the sum of its parts.

In cookbookland, this principle has translated into big volumes heavy with lush, sensual photographs and a certain sparseness of text. Text, after all, interferes with fantasy, and for the most part cookbooks are selling fantasy. Your life, too, can be filled with bowls of perfect, late-summer, vine-ripened tomatoes just waiting to be made into this or that. All you have to do is buy this $50 book!

So, in such an overheated environment, the achievement of Berkeley's Ten Speed Press in publishing cookbooks of real substance and interest deserves a doff of the proverbial cap. One of their latest offerings, The Scent of Orange Blossoms: Sephardic Cuisine from Morocco, by Kitty Morse and Danielle Mamane ($24.95), provides not only straightforward recipes for a variety of Moroccan staples (preserved lemons, harissa, salted green plums) and Sephardic menus for traditional Jewish holidays but also an intimate tutorial in the millennia-long chronicle of the Sephardim – those Jews of the Diaspora who settled in Iberia and whose bright, sunny food is unimaginably far removed from the buttery, potatoey dishes of their northern kin, the Ashkenazim.

The migration of the Sephardim to North Africa to escape the Inquisition (itself a part of the long struggle between Christendom and Islam) brought some serious changes to the Moroccan diet. Harissa, for instance, the famous hot sauce, depends on the hot pepper – a New World delicacy brought back by the conquistadores to Spain, where it became known to the Jews and was taken with them in their flight across the Strait of Gibraltar. (The road also ran in the other direction; it is believed that Jewish émigrés and traders helped carry couscous, the staple pasta of North Africa, to the Italian port of Livorno, where it became a signature part of the local cuisine.)

It makes a difference, somehow, to know not merely that some food or condiment you like has a history and a historical meaning but also that you know the history. Because food is history. When we eat harissa or preserved lemons (preferably of our own making), we are partaking of the past – of earlier chapters of a story that's still going on. And, occasionally, being written down.