Padma Lakshmi’s book features flavors from around the world, including her native India, like this Braised Beef.

WEINSTEIN BOOKS / DITTE ISAGER

Padma Lakshmi, the host of Bravo’s very popular Top Chef is easy to look at and presumably knows her way around a kitchen. So there are photos of both Lakshmi and her lovely food filling the pages of her new book Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet: A World of Recipes for Every Day, (Weinstein Books; $34.95).

A theater arts graduate of Clark University in Worcester, Mass., she was born in India and burst onto the international scene as a supermodel and actress. There’s no culinary training in her background.

But in her book, she imparts a love of food that began when she was young and cooked with her mother while exploring all the cuisines in New York where they moved to start a new life after her parents divorced. One day it was Polish sausages, another Vietnamese steamed fish. A Peruvian babysitter taught her to make mashed potato empanadas. Her mother’s boyfriend for a time was from Barbados and she learned to eat tropical Caribbean food.

Though she tried to be vegetarian as a child, preferring salads to bologna sandwiches, she writes, “My mother the Brahmin culinary heretic actually encouraged me to eat meat.”

She sprinkled bacon on salads, the top of eggs and grits and even grilled cheese sandwiches. In college, Lakshmi used bacon as a hangover cure in the form of fried eggs and honey mustard-glazed bacon on toasted English muffins.

As a model, her career took her around the globe and she said her “gastronomical research” continued with all the classical cuisine in Europe and beyond. But she learned it’s only American bacon she loved, not the thick cut of European kitchens.

I know all this information gives very little insight into the more than 100 recipes in the book but I thoroughly enjoyed all the personal essays that give us a peek into Lakshmi. Many of the dishes look entirely approachable, cast-iron chicken or creamy broccoli soup and Tuscan lemon pudding. A few others require a long list of ingredients and tough ones to find at that: Rose Petal and Pistachio Ice Cream requires rose syrup and Turkish rose jam and dried rose petals. Her favorite ingredients to use in the kitchen are ginger, coconut milk, cinnamon, sugar, chilies and yuzu juice.

“I take classic recipes, such as chicken soup or macaroni and cheese, and add something unique to them, originality and complexity,” she said.

But I have to admit it’s the woman, not the recipes, who intrigues me the most.

She married author Salman Rushdie in 2004, but the two began divorce proceedings this year. The book is dedicated to S.R. so we can only wonder.

Here’s a recipe from the book.

gciampa@projo.com