New Delhi, July 4 -- Southerners love a bit of everything when it comes to their food-spicy, smoky, sweet, layered. "Our cuisine is not just food, but it's history you can taste," chef Ross Dover tells me at Palmetto's on the Bayou in Slidell, Louisiana, as we sit over a meal that's a veritable cultural mosaic with French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, and Indigenous influences. Trade routes, migration, and climate influenced the cuisine, as did the so-called "holy trinity" of onion, celery and bell pepper. "Along with that, we love our seafood, and Cajun and Creole spices," he adds.

And so, when it's time to leave, I decide to eschew magnets and postcards, and return home with varied tastes enough to fill my pantry and recreate some of t...