It was a perfect Scottish summer’s day: two pairs of “Arbroath” smokies and ice-cold beers laid out on a wooden garden table, a lush green lawn bordered by nodding hydrangeas and hollyhocks, all set against a backdrop of jagged peaks.

An idyllic holiday in the Angus glens? It certainly felt like it — the only thing missing were the midges. The stone-gabled house was, in fact, Johnson’s Lodge in the highland foothills of the Himalayas, and the beer was Kingfisher. The restaurant manager told me that the fish were trout plucked from the Beas river and smoked over applewood from their orchard. The recipe is lost in the mists of time, but believed to be a legacy of the owner’s ancestors.

Over pudding — a chocolate and ice-cream confection called “say hello to the Queen” — I began to wonder if the British left behind more than railways and a triplicate bureaucracy when they quit India in 1947. It seems that I can still satisfy my cravings for the fish of my Auchmithie childhood holidays and anything sickly sweet and artery-clogging without the inconvenience of a 10-hour flight home.

I’ve been on an eccentric quest to track down Scottish recipes left behind in India after independence ever since. It’s a journey that has taken me from the smoked trout of Himachal Pradesh, in the north, to “mince and tatties” — I kid you not — in Karnataka, in the south. And as a long-distance member of the Greggs appreciation society, I’ve even discovered I need never want for a steak pie again.

My journey has taken in hotels peddling colonial nostalgia for five-star tourists, as well as Anglo-Indian communities whose identity is partly defined by the British — and often Scottish — food they eat. The road will be long and calorie-laden, and the journey has just begun, but I’m convinced that there is a corner of our former empire that will be for ever deep-fried in batter.

The Windamere, in Darjeeling, started life in the 19th century as a boarding house for Scottish tea-planters and, in this beautiful corner of West Bengal, time has stood still. Scottish traditions have been enthusiastically upheld — porridge continues to be a breakfast staple and, as Jan Morris, the travel writer, once noted, it is “unsurpassed even in Scotland”.

Lunch frequently includes lemon drizzle cake and everything stops for afternoon tea on the veranda. Photo albums in the bar show kilt-wearing revellers enjoying Hogmanay high jinks, complete with the hokey cokey and Auld Lang Syne.

When I asked if the Windamere would be willing to let me have a look at old recipe books, I was met with a perplexed but polite silence. After a few weeks of gentle probing, however, an e-mail message popped into my inbox: “Roly-poly pudding, an authentic British Raj pud and most certainly devoured by Scots”. Saner people might have transferred it straight into the spam box, but I was like a dog with a bone and I knew I was on to something.

The hotel’s manager explained that many of the Raj-era recipes were never written down, but simply passed down. She had finally persuaded her chef to dictate the recipe. The quest was becoming an oral-history project, but the prospect of being the one to record (and eat) all these treasures for posterity was just too tantalising.

There were no such problems in Bangalore, where last week I met Bridget Kumar, an obsessive chronicler of all things Anglo-Indian and author of five recipe books crammed with such delights as “grandma’s country captain chicken” and “railway mutton curry”.

At first glance, Bangalore, the home of modern India’s IT miracle, is a city that more than any other has freed itself from every trace of the Raj. Yet I found a community that has held on to many Scottish and English food traditions and used them to carve out its own identity.

Kumar greeted me with tea and shortbread. When she rustled up mince and tatties and said I could borrow her precious old recipe books, I was ready for her to adopt me. They include a rare 1874 edition of the Madras Cookery Book, written anonymously by “an English resident’s wife”, which contains recipes — or “receipts” as the memsahib called them — for Caledonian classics such as Scotch broth, mashed turnips and scones.

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