Nancy Allen has written the textbook she says she needed when she was teaching cooking. Her 933-page book, Discovering Global Cuisines, complete with recipes and photos, overviews of culture, history and geography from all over the world, is the result of five years of unflagging endeavor. The work required not just sitting at a computer terminal for endless hours, but actually preparing the food and trying out the recipes with her friends and neighbors and also testing them in places like Meadowlark, a long-standing organic subscription agriculture farm on the Leelanau Peninsula.