It hadn’t crossed Anissa Helou’s mind to write a cookbook until she found herself at a dinner party in London with a table of people who, like her, were born in Lebanon and now lived far from home, discussing the paucity of Lebanese cookbooks.

This was in the summer of 1992. Back then, Ms. Helou was working as an art consultant.

But the conversation struck her. She realized that an entire generation of Lebanese people who had been uprooted by the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, had also lost access to the food of their homeland.

She issued a corrective in the form of her first cookbook, “Lebanese Cuisine,” published in 1994. To her surprise, it was shortlisted for the André Simon award, which honors British food and drink books.

“I was a nonentity then,” Ms. Helou said. “Nobody knew me.”

Ms. Helou, 66, is far from a nonentity now — a chef, a cooking teacher and a rather prolific cookbook writer. She wrote eight more books after “Lebanese Cuisine,” covering topics as wide-ranging as Mediterranean street food and offal.