Spring and summer cookbooks are different from their fall and winter siblings, the big-name ones who get all the airtime. The authors’ names might be new, but their voices are strong and independent. They remind me of how the legendary cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey, speaking at the recent women’s food conference Cherry Bombe Jubilee, described her childhood: Because she was a girl, and since her sister was prettier, her parents let her run wild to satisfy her creative curiosity, thereby allowing her to become the significant person she is today. And so, as I read and cooked through this season’s assortment of outliers, I was thrilled to get to know so many bright minds and brilliant palates, to be introduced to cultures and techniques that hadn’t been front-burnered in my kitchen.

Israeli food has been celebrated since Yotam Ottolenghi came on the scene over a decade ago. The culinary traditions of Palestine? Not so much. While working on a human rights campaign in Israel’s West Bank in 2009, Yasmin Khan found that the difficulty of the days spent in refugee camps relented at night when she was welcomed to local tables to sample bowls of thick hummus and smoky eggplant spiked with peppery olive oil, vibrant herb salads and fresh, sharply flavorful dishes — so flavorful that they lured Khan from her home in London back to Israel and the West Bank to learn more about the recipes and realities of life for the millions of Palestinians living there, not to mention the millions who make up the world’s largest refugee population. ZAITOUN: Recipes From the Palestinian Kitchen (Norton, $29.95) is valuable not just for the dishes Khan learned from local women and translated from restaurant meals — be they a warm salad of maftoul (a plump kind of couscous) with za’atar chicken, Gazan lentils with Swiss chard and tahini, or turnovers made from a very forgiving yogurt-enriched dough and stuffed with spinach, feta, pine nuts and sumac — but for the heartfelt portrait she so deftly paints of this shattered but resilient region.