Professor Heather Sharkey pursued a project with her students to study one cookbook in Penn's collection: The Sephardic Heritage Cookbook, published in 2016 by the women's society of a Sephardic temple in Los Angeles.
The Scalar site is published: https://pennds.org/recipes/sephardic-heritage-cookbook/index You can see the Table of Contents by clicking on the three bars in the upper left-hand corner. Essays cover the history of the congregation, of particular dishes, of migratory routes that brought member families to California and more. A whole section goes into the history of individual ingredients featured in the cookbook, such as saffron and rosewater.
The Penn Libraries has accessioned the project so that it is discoverable and searchable through the Penn Libraries database: https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9979149616603681