It’s possible that Asian food is more prominent in the American imagination than the Asian people who produce it. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, the political scientist Harold Isaacs became curious about how average Americans had formed impressions of far-away China and India. Isaacs and a team of researchers interviewed U.S. citizens from a variety of backgrounds and professions to learn what, exactly, had prompted them to decide that people from these countries were friendly or suspect, hardworking or lazy, intelligent or uncivilized. The subjects rarely spoke of personal encounters: Americans didn’t travel to China or India much, and decades of restrictive immigration policies in the U.S. meant that there were few Chinese- and Indian-Americans then. (The few that were here tended to live in small, sequestered neighborhoods.) Instead, the interview subjects had come to know Asia through TV and the movies, comic books and bestselling novels (like “The Good Earth”), or via the occasional news story or a funny character in an anecdote told by a globetrotting uncle. When it came to the Chinese, one experience in particular seemed to evoke universal feelings of appreciation: “The familiar and pleasurable experience of eating Chinese food.”

Once an indictment of barbaric ways, Chinese food had, by the end of the fifties, become a commonplace delicacy that seemed to bring an exotic people a little bit closer. As one of the people Isaacs interviewed remarked, “One feels that a people who have evolved such food must have high qualities and a high civilization.” But even as Asian food became ubiquitous, the profile of the Asian chef lacked texture, and this was the case for decades. The genial PBS showman Martin Yan, whose show “Yan Can Cook” first aired in 1982, might have been the first Asian-American man I ever saw on television. I remember wondering why, even after hundreds of hours in front of the camera, he had been unable to shake his accent.

This began to change about ten years ago, when the success of David Chang’s Momofuku restaurants, as well as the inroads he made on television and in the publishing world, gave him an unprecedented visibility. In recent years, a frenzied interest in all things Asian has given chefs like Roy Choi, Dale Talde, and Danny Bowien an opportunity to turn their restaurants and cookbooks into sites of autobiographical exploration. In her new documentary, “Off the Menu,” the filmmaker Grace Lee asks: “Do we think we understand a culture better when it’s in our stomachs?” By and large, the answer seems to be yes: the belief that we can better understand one another by eating each other’s food quietly underwrites an increasingly expansive vision of American cuisine. Whether we can actually consume our way to cultural comprehension is, of course, another question entirely. And what if it’s your own culture you’re trying to understand?

“Off the Menu,” which will air on PBS in December, follows Lee on a road trip in search of Asian-American stories, from a community-run organic farm in Hawaii to the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, where, in 2012, a white supremacist gunned down members while they were preparing langar, the traditional communal meal that is open to anyone. Once Lee enters the realm of commerce, though, she realizes the limitations of letting such intimate encounters determine her narrative. Immigrants, after all, are often more concerned with survival than with accurate self-representation. Lee meets Glen Gondo, the affable Sushi King of Texas, whose empire not only comprises Japanese food but bastardized takes on other Asian cuisines as well. Gondo eventually brings Lee to his test kitchen, where two Korean chefs stretch the ethical limits of sushi rolls, speckling them with crushed-up Flaming Hot Cheetos. Elsewhere, Gary Chiu, the thoughtful heir to a Texas tofu fortune, regards his chipotle-tofu egg rolls and tofu-stuffed green-chili tamales and asks himself, “Is this something I grew up with? Or is this something I created to sell?”

Being able to ask such a question suggests relative privilege—it’s the kind of existential quandary that only vexes those with enough distance to look back at where it all began. As the documentary progresses, the self-conscious way that traditions evolve becomes its most fascinating through-line. Jonathan Wu, a thoughtful, meticulous chef who honed his technique at Per Se before opening Manhattan’s celebrated Fung Tu, explains that his dishes start with “a flavor memory,” a sensation that he hopes to reconstruct and translate into something surreal and new. Lee tags along with Wu as he visits his grandfather in Yonkers, a trip he often takes to find inspiration. Communication with his grandfather is halting but pure, and the distance between them becomes a space for play, for projection and dreaming in the kitchen. Wu assembles his version of an egg roll, spiked with the surprising tang of chilies and olives, for his grandfather and his grandfather’s friend. They like it. And then they ask: What is this?

What Wu and the past decade of celebrated chefs represent is a turn away from the Asian chef as some kind of native informant. When Irene Kuo published “The Key to Chinese Cooking,” one of the first major cookbooks devoted to Asian cuisine, in 1977, it was presented as a glimpse into the Chinese psyche as much as an introduction to Chinese cooking technique. In her preface, Kuo writes of the Chinese, “They eat boiled bark, weeds, and roots when there is nothing else; they eat shallow-fried transparent prawns from preference, jasmine blossoms out of poetic sentiment, and wine-braised camel’s hump from blatant extravagance. If there is anything the Chinese are perpetually serious about it is food.” In the years since, cookbooks devoted to Asian food have continued to adopt a tone of expertise, parsing regional differences or historicizing spice tolerance, approaching their subjects with a kind of scholarly reverence.

Peter Meehan’s essential “101 Easy Asian Recipes,” on the other hand, is typical of a newer, more relaxed sensibility. A punky, frenetically curious food writer best known for his frequent collaborations with David Chang, Meehan explains early on that his book’s title is a bit of a joke. “We are acutely aware that Asia’s size and complexity are so vast that it is a ridiculous idea to reduce its cuisines—each its own private infinity once you begin to parse regions and subregions and the variations and innovations that individual cooks employ in their kitchens every day—down to 101 recipes that are representative of anything.” The acknowledgment becomes liberating, as Meehan and the staff of Lucky Peach, the food quarterly he edits, run through a greatest-hits of primarily East Asian favorites. Despite moments of big-city insiderishness—references to Chang and their chef pals, mostly—the book is welcoming and, as the title promises, very easy to use.

It’s also very funny. My favorite recipe is for the classic standby dessert of many Chinese restaurants: “Oranges.” Alongside familiar and subtly tweaked classics are recipes that might appeal to those who first encountered Asian food as the alien half of some unholy fusion. The St. Paul Sandwich is a Midwestern staple born of necessity—essentially egg foo young on a bun—while Chinese Chicken Salad is, as Meehan acknowledges, “as Asian as David Carradine.” And then there is Lucky Peach’s take on that food-court classic, the mysteriously satisfying, sweet-and-sour simulacrum known here as Mall Chicken.