When I told friends that I was featuring the Pitt Rivers Museum on my food page, they laughed. "What on earth has the museum got to do with food?" they asked. When I explained that Friends of the museum had written a cookery book linked with the exhibits, they accepted the idea with enthusiasm. Indeed, it sparked a fascinating conversation about the various cuisines they may have included.

Most visitors encountering the Pitt Rivers collection for the first time gasp with surprise as they survey the countless rows of cabinets overflowing with artefacts and treasures. The Pitt Rivers contains one of the world's great ethnographic collections, which includes many objects of rarity, beauty and value. The collection contains ordinary and typical specimens too, but nothing that has been mass produced - almost everything on show has been hand crafted.

The museum gets its name from Lt Gn Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, a rather eccentric Victorian gentleman who donated his collection of 14,000 to 15,000 specimens acquired from all over the world to Oxford University, on the condition that they found a permanent home for it. Objects in the collection, which has grown considerably since that original donation, are arranged according to type, which is why there's a cookery case in the Lower Gallery containing a variety of cooking utensils, some black-eared corn and a piece of cheese as old as the museum itself.

When Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum decided to compile recipes from around the world, inspired by the exhibits, as a fund raising venture, they were tempted to concentrate on the cooking utensils in this case. But they didn't want to do just another cookbook, so decided to relate the recipes to objects on display.

It was Liz Yardley, a long-standing Friend, who suggested the cookbook. She explained that the Friends needed to raise £10,000 for 'matching funding' for the Lottery and Wolfson Foundation grants awarded for museum development. As the Friends had already done a food-related trail of the museum entitled First Catch your Hare, as part of the Food for Thought fundraiser in the late 1990s, she saw the cookbook as an extension of that idea.

She said: "We had thought of calling our book First Catch your Missionary, but then that was seen as being rather un-PC, so we have called it Particularly Ravishing Morsels."

Once that had been decided, Liz set about contacting all the Friends and requesting recipes they had encountered on their travels.

She was most encouraged by the response. "One of the Friends, Vicky Bowman, the British Ambassador in Rangoon, sent a Burmese tomato salad recipe, complete with a photo of the dish served on an embassy plate. In her preface to the recipe, Vicky explains that visitors to Burma who take the strictures of the guidebooks too seriously and avoid salads miss out on one of the best parts of Burmese cuisine. A-thouq, which is generally used to mean salad in Burmese, should be taken seriously. She goes on to explain that there are many varieties of a-thouq, including ginger (qyin-thouq), pickled tea (leq-hpeq-thouq), potato (ar-lu-thouq) and aubergine (kayan-thi-thouq)."

To illustrate this page, a carved Buddhist deity from Burma and a picture of tomatoes growing on floating islands built up from water hyacinth roots and silt and tethered to the floor of the lake by poles, sit besides the salad photograph.

George Kwaider, one of the museum attendants, provided several Middle-Eastern dishes from his native Palestine, including maqluba, an upside down lamb, rice and aubergine casserole. Apparently, upside-down dishes have a long history and can be found in the 13th-century Arabic cookbook known as the Baghdad Cookery Book, which devotes an entire chapter to fried, marinated and turned dishes, which, as the name suggests, really are turned upside down before serving. Maqluba calls for tomato slices to be arranged on the bottom of a large heavy-bottomed casserole dish, then sprinkled with rice, cooked lamb, aubergine and more rice, then pressed down firmly with the back of your hand. It has to be cooked for at least an hour, or until the rice is tender and all the liquid absorbed. When inverted on to a serving dish, the maqluba displays a glorious red topping from the layer of tomatoes.

This recipe is illustrated by photographs showing a Sharafani man from Kurdistan and house building in the marshes of southern Iraq, both of which can be seen in the Pitt Rivers collection.

Rosemary Sylvester's recipe, inspired by Chinese dragon pictures, is actually quite a healthy dish despite being called Dragon's Eyeballs. It's a recipe for young people and is based on creamy mashed potato which is decorated with a small egg, pulped spinach and chopped tomato.

The book concludes with a recipe by Dolar Dave, who calls it his Gujarati Cure-all, as it contains ajwain seeds which aid digestion if chewed. They also reduce the flatulence caused by beans when a small amount is cooked with them. He explains that ajwain seeds, which look rather like cumin or caraway seeds, have a high thymol content and are frequently used in Ayurvedic medicine along with turmeric and unrefined sugar. As ajwain has a very powerful taste it must be used with care. Although these seeds, which are very peppery when raw, become a little milder when cooked - beware, even a small amount will dominate a dish. They are best used sparingly.

Particularly Ravishing Morsels costs £7.95 and is available at the Pitt Rivers, the Ashmolean Museum shop and Cole's Bookshop in Bicester.