At her farmers market stall in rural Victoria, Australia, Yoko Nakazawa realized that people outside Japan didn’t know how to eat Japanese pickles.

“That was a shock,” she says. Nowadays, she has a ready answer for customers who ask how to enjoy them: “Once you have the pickles, you can make so many dishes.”

Her debut cookbook, “The Japanese Art of Pickling and Fermenting: Preserving Vegetables and Family Traditions,” offers an in-depth look at her passion for this food preservation process. To make the 125 recipes authentic and accessible to a global audience, the vegetables used are, for the most part, widely available and prepared with intrinsically Japanese techniques — buried in beds of buckwheat husks or enriched after aging in sake lees.