I wasn’t expecting to find a tempest in a stockpot in Crimea, where I recently spent a month covering a story on that part of southern Ukraine. But that’s what happened when I met Galina Onischenko, a devoutly pro-Russian citizen of Sevastopol. Galina invited me over for lunch at her fifth-floor walk-up apartment and served borscht. Even before my spoon hit the soup, she wanted me to know that her borscht was Russian. Her tone implied that borscht from any other Slavic country was not even worth mentioning.

There are no political boundaries when it comes to recipes, but no surprise, either, to food being a sticking point (dare we say a flashpoint in a pan?) for nationalist rivalries and tension. Think of the culinary kafuffle of 2003 when U.S. conservatives renamed French fries “freedom fries” to express anti-French sentiment during international debate over the launch of the Iraq invasion. And so it is with borscht. Just ask Galina.

Shadows are lengthening. The air turns soft. Autumn is here and in the vineyards of Crimea, grapevine leaves have turned red and yellow. Soon, Massandra, a winery near Yalta built in the 19th century to supply wines for Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar, will begin turning this year’s harvest into bottles of nectar, like the desert wine that beguiled me called “Seventh Heaven.”

Though it is four months since I was in Crimea—now part of Ukraine, once part of the Soviet Union—the thought of the harvest summons the lovely afternoon I spent tasting wines with Galina Ivanovna Myayeva, Massandra’s deputy director of international trade. Galina, who is 72, was “born among the barrels,” she says. Her father and mother were in the wine business. As you might expect, she has a well formed opinion about each and every grape that comes on to the premises, and each and every bottle of wine that gets shipped out.

She offers a Muscat that tastes of raisins; a topaz colored Riesling with the scent of alpine meadows and port the color of rubies with the fragrance of violets.

Winemaking in Crimea is more than 2500 years old, which makes Massandra a relative newcomer. The Greeks, who colonized the Crimean coast, grew grapes in the rocky limestone soils that overlook the Black Sea. Crimea’s average of 300 sunny days a year and the dark shale soils that hold heat during the day and radiate it back at night provide the perfect combination for Crimea’s trademark desert wines.

Galina Ivanovna, a large woman who stands foursquare on thick, stocky legs, is ferocious in her passion for the wine produced by this flinty soil--as the Soviet Politburo discovered 25 years ago.

A couple of years ago I wrote a story for National Geographic about regional foods. Not the standard mascots like Philadelphia Cheesesteak or New England clam chowder, but the obscure, sometimes incongruous but often delicious concoctions that have managed to stay within state borders.

There are plenty of offbeat delicacies associated with just one state; a huge pastry called kringle in Wisconsin, for example, or the toasted ravioli cherished in Missouri. I recently learned in a New York Times article about a Utah favorite called a pastrami burger, which as it sounds, is an over-stuffed rendezvous of two red meats. There are also lots of dishes linked to what food historians call "micro regions." It's a fairly loose term, and can be used to describe an area within a state, or larger areas that may involve a couple of states or more.

Ferula asafoetida

I was shopping for Indian spices with a friend not long ago and she steered me toward a small yellow container of a powdered spice called asafoetida, or hing in Hindi. She explained that it tastes like onion or garlic, but that I’d have to fry it in oil to bring out that flavor; otherwise it would be highly unpalatable. Why, I mused, would anyone bother with asafoetida when onions, garlic or leeks were more predictable? My caution grew when I learned that the name of the spice is based on the Latin word “foetida,” meaning stinky, and that colloquially it is also known as Stinking Gum or Devil’s Dung.

My friend is a scholar of Jainism, one of India’s main religions. She explained that “devil’s dung” is one of the ways that Jains can add pungency to their cuisine without using onion or garlic, which are forbidden.

When Zviad Guruli gets homesick, he calls his friends back in the Republic of Georgia on Skype, but is careful not to spill his special sauce on the keyboard. Like many Georgians, his national identity is tied up in food and he cooks up a batch of favorite dishes before ringing his friends and inviting them to an electronic supra (feast). There might be lamb with the spicy plum-cilantro sauce tkemali or grilled meat rubbed with khmeli-suneli, a complex, dried herb mixture of coriander seed, basil, dill weed, summer savory, parsley, mint, fenugreek leaves, ground marigold and bay leaf. Guruli, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., plants a glass of red wine in easy reach, then he and his faraway friends toast, talk, and sing away the miles between Tbilisi and Northern Virginia, where Guruli, 34, lives with his American wife, Erin and four children, Sofie, Michael, Noah, and Nick.

When I was working for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn in the early 1980s, my colleague Tom O’Boyle thought about writing a quirky story about Spam, the canned ham. He’d heard that Germans loved the stuff. We were baffled by its popularity in a country where every corner grocery was resplendent with fresh pork products.

O’Boyle never wrote the story, but since then I have gathered string on the cultural hegemony of Spam. It’s very big: Since its invention in 1937, six billion cans have been sold in 46 countries and Americans alone buy 90 million cans a year.