There is more than one way to travel the world. There is, of course, the buy-a-ticket, wait-on-line, pay-a-lot-of-money-to-sit-in-a-too-small-seat way which, grueling as it often is, can still be tremendously rewarding. But for those high stress, tight budget, orange threat level, there's-no-place-like-home moments, give me a cookbook any day.

A skilled cookbook author can transport you to the markets, the rituals, the private homes of far way places, evoking the aroma of exotic spices and the flavor of simmering delicacies so intensely that you can actually gain weight just from reading about them (no lie, I have documented this in my own life).

Cookbooks may not be what people customarily think of as travel literature, but to my mind, they get right to the heart of the important things.

If you know how people eat, you are more than half way to knowing who they are. It's hard to sterotype, demonize, or dehumanize people when you are sitting in their kitchens.

Perhaps something like this was in the mind of former Bloomington Nawal Nasrallah when she began work on Delights from the Garden of Eden, her lovely, mouthwatering, meticulously researched book on the cuisine of her native Iraq. Indeed, she saw her task in part to illuminate a region that people know very little about.

"There is more to Iraq than Saddam and his cronies," she said. "To me a good cookbook is the best ambassador to the outside world."

These days, the pictures that come to us out of Iraq are scarcely appetizing. Although the war has been officially over for months, the images are still of a country under siege — dusty, demolished, dangerous.

But Nasrallah has her eye fixed on a different, sunnier day in Iraq. Children play safely outdoors on eucalyptus and citrus scented streets. A neighbor preparing a special dish makes enough to share, and by custom never receives her plate back without another neighbor's home cooked offering in return. Friends from all over the Arab world share the dishes of their homelands in the melting pot that is Baghdad, sending delicious aromas wafting out to tantalize their children and call them home for dinner.

Iraqi cuisine reflects the agricultural bounty of a part of the world so lush that it is said to have been the location of the Garden of Eden. Rice and grain dishes and flat breads of all sorts, and vegetables and legumes, stuffed, simmered, or pureed into spreads. Rich stews of lamb and beef, braised chicken, grilled kebabs, stuffed vine leaves, baked fish. Everything fragrant with the characteristic flavors of the Iraqi kitchen: coriander, allspice, cumin, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, thyme, mint, sumac, parsley and dill, onion, garlic, lemon and dried lime. And for special occasions, elaborate, sweet desserts made with honey or date syrup, nuts, and fruits such as apricots and figs.

But for Nasrallah, what Iraqis eat today is just a snapshot in a much longer history, a gastronomic journey spanning thousands of years. Eager to trace its roots, she peeks into the kitchens of the ancient Mesopotamians, examining cuneiform tablets, medieval manuscripts, and other historical evidence to see what the earliest residents of the Fertile Crescent were having for dinner.

And so, with her, we spy on the culinary habits of the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Arabs and the Turks. Through all the business of empire building and ignominious defeat, of reaching new scientific and technological heights and sinking into dark ages of ignorance, of founding some of the world's greatest religions, and dying for lack of harmony between them, the people of Mesopotamia cooked and they ate. And Nasrallah painstakingly bears witness to how they did it.

There are over 400 recipes in Delights from the Garden of Eden, and the ones I have tried are wonderful. But although the recipes are in a way the main point of a cookbook, in another way they are here a mere vehicle for the stories, the food lore, the proverbs, the poetry, the word play and the sociological tidbits that Nasrallah has to share.

This massive book (Delights from the Garden of Eden clocks in at nearly 650 pages) was largely written in Bloomington (and researched at the IU Library), while Nasrallah's husband, Shakir Mustafa, completed his doctorate in literature at IU.

The couple had both been professors in Iraq, teaching under the thumb of Saddam Hussein's increasingly repressive regime. When Mustafa went to Bloomington to study in 1990, Nasrallah and her three children planned to follow. Their departure date turned out to be the day the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait, and they were unable to get out. One month later she finally managed to get to Jordan with her two youngest, crying all the way because she'd had to leave her oldest son, of military service age, behind. He finally managed to join his family in the summer of 1991.

Altogether, Nasrallah lived here for ten years and although she now lives in Boston, where her husband teaches at Boston University, she still considers Bloomington a second home. It was a place of joy for her, where supportive neighbors embraced her when the Gulf War started in 1991, where her kids grew up and where she made many friends, and where the smell of the spice jars at Bloomingfoods could carry her back to the famous Baghdadi spice market, the Souq al-shorja.

But Bloomington was also a place of family tragedy for Nasrallah. She herself was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1994 and in 1996 her youngest son, Bilal, died at 13 of a brain hemorrhage. Trying to keep her mind occupied, she put her longtime love of food and her professor's passion for research to work on a historical cookbook.

She was amazed to find so much information about ancient and medieval Iraqi cuisine, and pleased that she could make this information available to a general audience (in fact, her next project will be to translate a 10th century Baghdadi cookbook into English.) Six years later, Delights from the Garden of Eden is the result.

The cookbook field is notoriously hard to break into, and over 20 publishers rejected the book. In the end, with the dogged persistence that carried her through 8000 years of historical research, she brought the book out herself, through 1stBooks Library of Bloomington, just in time to face questions about why she had written something so mundane as a cookbook with the Iraqi people on the brink of a devastating war.

But Nasrallah doesn't consider the topic of food to be trivial, as she explains in her preface: "I find in food and in memories of food my refuge, my comfort and a consolation when things are not looking good, as they say here."

She quotes the prophet Muhammad's grandson: "Sit at dinner tables and socialize as long as you can, for these are the bonus times of your lives."