I’M GUESSING the most pressing question many readers will bring to this article pertains to drug testing. And the answer is yes, you might fail a drug test (depending on the test) if you have eaten, say, a poppy seed bagel within 48 hours—though the seeds won’t get you high.

I use the bagel as my example because eating one seems to be the way most contemporary American diners encounter poppy seeds regularly—apart from, perhaps, a lemon-poppy seed muffin. Yet an expansive range of foods, all over the world, features those crunchy seeds with an elusive flavor I can best describe as a subdued kind of smoky, with some black-peppery and oregano notes.

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Poppy seeds are a byproduct of a plant cultivated for its narcotic sap, and, as such, bound to a long and troubled history of drug profiteering: As the opium trade expanded, the seeds spread in equal measure. In “The True Cost of Posto,” published in Whetstone magazine’s online journal in May, author Sohel Sarkar revisits the foods of her childhood in Bengal, conjuring warm memories of dishes like kancha posto batta—a paste of ground poppy seeds (posto) made with salt, mustard oil and green chiles or onions—as well as the shadow of exploitation over Bengal’s ties to those seeds.

In India, cooks favor white poppy seeds, with a gentler flavor than the black or strikingly beautiful peacock blue-black ones more prevalent elsewhere. The latter show up in Jewish cooking around the world. Growing up in Pittsburgh, Darra Goldstein, a food scholar, cookbook author and professor emeritus of Russian, associated the seeds with the challah her mother sprinkled them on—much to her daughter’s chagrin. But in Russia she came to love them.

According to Ms. Goldstein, “It was Jewish merchants who imported poppy seeds into Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, into that whole region from the Black Sea trade, from Byzantium basically. Even people in the shtetl in 19th-century Russia were able to go to stores and get sesame seeds and poppy seeds from these Jewish merchants.” She told me about a dish called kutia, a wheat berry porridge sweetened with honey and doused with poppy seeds, served at Christmastime in Russia and other Slavic countries. “Then you throw a spoonful up to the ceiling. If it sticks, you’ll have a good year,” she said. “Of course it sticks because you have lots of honey. It’s rigged.”

You’ll find ribbons of pasta tossed with a sugared poppy seed butter sauce in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the northeasternmost region of Italy that borders Austria and Slovenia—and shares many ingredients with Central Europe. And in the Veneto town of Cortina d’Ampezzo, crimped crescent-shaped pasta filled with beets and tossed in melted butter with poppy seeds is a local specialty.

For Israeli chef Itamar Srulovich, of the Middle-Eastern restaurants Honey & Co. and Honey & Smoke and the grocery shop Honey & Spice in London, the discovery that they finish noodles this way in Eastern Europe “kind of opened the door for me.” And he credits Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi with exposing him to a host of other savory poppy seed applications. When Mr. Srulovich worked with Mr. Tamimi at London’s landmark Ottolenghi restaurant, the latter would use them “in salads all the time and to roast chicken.”

The Edinburgh-based English travel and cookbook writer Caroline Eden has had many encounters with poppy seeds along the Silk Road, tracking the food of Central and Western Asia and Southeast Europe. One of the most memorable was in Turkey—a top global exporter of the ingredient, Ms. Eden noted. In the northern city of Amasya, in 2016, she tracked down a bakery she’d heard about called Amasya Çörekcisi, established in 1925 and famous for its “sweet rolls that are as flaky as they are soft, and many come studded with tiny poppy seeds.” She recalled biting into one “right outside the bakery, and the seeds raining down onto the pavement.”

Ukrainian-born cookbook author Olia Hercules, who lives in London, includes a recipe for poppy seed rolls in her first cookbook, “Mamuskha,” and another for her poppy seed babka in her latest, “Summer Kitchens.” For her filling, she follows the traditional technique of soaking (or simmering) the seeds in milk to soften them, then crushes them in a food processor with the rest of the ingredients.

Mr. Srulovich and his wife and business partner, the chef Sarit Packer, tend to feature the seeds in sweet items at their establishments. They use a “barista-style grinder” to break them down (and at home, it’s “a coffee grinder whiz-up machine”). They have a recipe for yeasted currant-speckled poppy seed “roses” in their cookbook “Golden,” along with a syrup-soaked poppy seed and lemon cake. In the U.S., Mr. Srulovich said, “the cake would be a lot of lemon and a little poppy. Ours is a lot of poppy and a little lemon.”

I came up with a couple poppy seed recipes of my own that highlight the ingredient’s nuttiness—without lemon, and without requiring any grinding. As an alternative to that step (which I quickly deemed a pain), I toast the blue-black seeds to draw out their flavor. When I fold them into a warm salad of sautéed leeks and sweet Sungold tomatoes, I use oregano as a garnish, because, as noted above, I get hints of that herb from poppy seeds. In shortbread, I use an abundance of the seeds and nutty buckwheat flour. The result reminds me of slightly-more-savory pecan sandies. I always smile when I eat them, my teeth full of the evidence—no drug test required.

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