They can be faddish. They can be moralising. They can be fluff. But cookery books can also be magical. There is something wondrous about discovering a new way of cooking panang curry, a different take on bread-and-butter pudding, a twist to perfecting a bisque.

Cookery books are, though, about far more than recipes. They are historical witnesses. The earliest recipes are found carved into stone in 4,000-year-old Egyptian tombs, to ensure that servants of nobles could continue serving them perfect flatbread in the afterlife. The first true collection of recipes is probably Roman – Marcus Gavius Apicius’s De re Coquinaria (Of Culinary Matters). From around a millennium ago, one finds recipe manuscripts from all the major world traditions.

Until the 19th century, such collections were for the nobility or, rather, for their servants. With the coming of the industrial age, we find new titles such as A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes. The history of cookery books is also the history of class and gender, of empire and immigration, of mass culture and domestic architecture.

Even more than historical documents, cookery books are cultural witnesses. To bake or to steam or to roast is also to begin to unwrap a culture. The best writers – Claudia Roden, for instance – are anthropologists as much as cooks. At a time when there is much preening about “cultural appropriation”, food is the best reminder that cultures are forever colliding, borrowing, remaking.

I have open before me Anissa Helou’s wonderful Feast, which tells of the food of the Islamic world. Through her Iranian flatbreads, Indonesian crab curries and Indian haleems, Helou provides not just a wondrous journey through myriad tastes, but illuminates in a unique way the commonalities and differences of a vast set of cultures.

And where else would I have discovered how to roast a camel hump?

• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist