From Bedouin banquets to hipster hashi-burger food trucks, it’s time for taste-testing the desert-to-dessert caravan of camel milks, camel pizzas, camel sliders, ice cream flavors, energy drinks and upscale chocolate. Camel: It’s one of the world’s fastest-growing health-and-heritage consumer product sectors.

This dish was invented a year after I moved to New York, with the help of my large Asian pantry, especially curry leaves, whose smell reminds me of my innocent and unbound childhood.

My mother made kurus a lot for my brother and me because it was inexpensive, easy to prepare and, most importantly, delicious.

“If you imagine French cuisine as a tree,” says food historian Emmanuel Perrodin, “the leaves are in Paris, but the roots reside in Marseille”—fed by 2,600 years of migrations from the Mediterranean and beyond.