Ever since the publication of Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories, “Interpreter of Maladies,” in 2000, South Asian-themed fiction and nonfiction have been dominated by tales of immigrant experiences, with stories of mothers and fathers arriving in America in the 1970s to give birth to “first-generation” South Asian-Americans who struggle with various identity crises. It is quite easy, in the midst of this South Asian publishing upsurge, to forget about the stories of those born and raised in the subcontinent. Those stories remind the first or second generations of where our parents came from, and what they went through as children at home to succeed overseas.

The memoirs of the actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey, “Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India” (Knopf, 320 pages, $25), document her first 18 years growing up in a suburb of New Delhi. Ms. Jaffrey, a culinary star who in the past has won awards from the James Beard Foundation for her various cookbooks, relies greatly on food imagery and memory to describe her childhood, beginning with an image of her grandmother writing the holy syllable “om” in honey on her tongue when she was born in 1933.

The presence and importance of food in the daily lives of South Asians is a topic that can be discussed endlessly. The diversity in regional South Asian cookery is enormous: If one were to get four Indians from four different states — or four different towns in one state — in one room to talk about their mothers’ cooking, the conversation could go on for days. At the beginning of her publishing career, Ms. Jaffrey wrote about the Northern Indian, meat-and-vegetable dishes of her childhood, which happened to be more suitable for a Western palate in the 1970s than, say, the spicier vegetarian cooking of a Hindu family from the southern city of Chennai. But while cuisine plays a major role in the cultural lives of South Asians, it is so often used as a literary tool to entice and charm an American audience that, in many instances, food metaphors seem contrived.

Striking a balance is key, and Ms. Jaffrey does not go overboard in her descriptions of her mother’s soupy karha, or the shami kebabs of the New Delhi streets. She describes her life through food in plain-spoken terms, without unnecessary hyperbole about sensual, spicy smells or the luscious, silky texture of a mango. She’s beyond that — she wants to talk about how food brought her extended family together every night for a multi-course dinner, or how she shared regionally different dishes during school lunch periods with her Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Jain classmates before and after India’s independence and Partition in 1947, when Ms. Jaffrey was a young teenager.

Before this point in the book, she is consumed with describing her family life, including her simultaneous fascination with and distrust of her family’s patriarchal leaders, her grandfather and second-eldest uncle. She writes about how her aunt, Taiji, saved the best cuts of meat and the valued marrow bones of a curry for her own children, leaving cousins like Ms. Jaffrey to choose from the rest of the dish. She writes about how her mother, whom she called Bauwa, cooked a Muslim-inspired pullao for Sunday lunches instead of Ms. Jaffrey’s favorite dish of karhai (soup with chickpea dumplings) because her father and his brothers preferred the meaty pullao. Patriarchal tensions, neglectful fathers, and sibling rivalries — all are described through food without sounding overwrought or sentimental.

The most interesting part of the book comes during independence and partition, when many of Ms. Jaffrey’s Muslim classmates had to flee for their lives to East or West Pakistan. Ms. Jaffrey’s own family was sometimes targeted by rioters because of her family’s roots as aides to the pre-British Moghul emperors. Ms. Jaffrey writes about two twin Muslim classmates, never heard from again, who used to share their mother’s spicy goat curry with their friends during lunch. After partition, Ms. Jaffrey touches upon the great movement of Punjabi immigrants to Delhi, who brought with them tandoor cookery and a reliance on butter and milk in their meat stews and vegetarian dishes. This moment is defining in Indian culinary history — this was the first time that “tandoori chicken” appeared in the spotlight — but for Ms. Jaffrey, it was just another flavor in her diverse experience as a good eater.

Ms. Jaffrey only became interested in cooking at a time in her life not covered in this book: As a student in London, she began using recipes that her mother obligingly transcribed in airmail letters. Those recipes eventually became the basis for her first cookbook, “An Invitation to Indian Cooking.” Stopping short of the point where cooking and writing dominated her life, in “Climbing the Mango Trees” Ms. Jaffrey concentrates on the unconscious, indelible effect food had on her childhood experience. Her memoirs are an honest and clear account of a significant time in Indian history, seen through the eyes of a normal — and hungry — Indian teenager.