All views expressed are that of the writer.

Last autumn, I spent a few weeks at an artist’s residency on the West Coast of Scotland, sleeping and writing in an eco-pod and cooking communal meals in a gleaming glass-walled building from which we could watch endless storms pour over the loch. One evening, as sleet welted the windows, an artist from England announced she was going to make the ultimate comfort food – a traditional family favourite called kedgeree. As an American, I had never heard of it, and when she described its components, according to her gran’s recipe – rice, lentils, curry powder, smoked haddock, boiled eggs, milk – it sounded outlandish. But when I took my first bite of the dish, I was struck by an uncanny feeling of recognition.

It didn’t take long to figure out why. A quick google later, I learned that this traditional English dish in fact derives from khichdi, the rice-lentil mélange that I had enjoyed countless times a child of South Indian immigrants in America. Khichdi is eaten by the gods in the Mahabharata, referenced in Greek war accounts and noted in Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth-century travelogues. As kids, it was our go-to comfort food – what we were fed when we were sick or cold, what could always be rustled up when there was nothing in the fridge. As for how it ended up in the kitchens of Blighty (a word that, by the way, derives from the Urdu word vileti, meaning “foreign”), the story is familiar: the Brits developed a fondness for it during colonial days, and when they returned home, attempted to recreate it with the supplies at hand. Some say the smoked fish is a later Scottish addition, though apparently the 17th century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb enjoyed his khichdi with fish and eggs; he probably gave East India Company officers the tip while he was fighting them. Kedgeree is like khichdi’s doppelgänger – eerily familiar, but not the same.

This is something I’ve experienced many times since moving here five years ago. When I first arrived in the UK, I was tickled to see that even the most basic supermarkets stock Tilda basmati rice, mango pickle, and ready-meal dhal (certainly not the case in most American supermarkets). I get a kick out of fusty English tearooms serving mulligatawny soup, another classic Anglo-Indian mashup, deriving from the Tamil milagu, meaning black pepper, and tanni, meaning water. These doppelgängers extend beyond food: the other week, I passed through the Scottish town of Paisley, named after the teardrop-shaped textile motif that the British East India company imported from Mughal India in the 17th century; at one point the town was the biggest producer of the design in the world.

These moments of cultural crossover seem to surface on a near-daily basis. Maybe this is why I feel somehow more at home in postcolonial Britain than I do in the melting-pot land of my birth. In the United States, South Asian culture is marginal: intriguing, perhaps, but certainly not part of the mainstream. Here in the UK, it feels different. The legacy of empire simply means I have more of a reason to be here. My ancestors learned to perfect the Queen’s English and don Western clothes to be considered employable. In colonial Madras, my grandmother went to a school run by Scottish nuns and devoured Georgette Heyer’s Regency-era novels. In the 1930s, my grandfather travelled by ship from Hyderabad to London, where he had a scholarship to study engineering through a colonial program; around that time, India’s future leaders were hatching plans for independence in London cafes. For so many reasons, from spices to language to units of measurement, the connection between the coloniser and colonised – however fraught and unjust the history – runs deep.

It’s not uncommon for these conflicts to play out over food – fusion food was always borne out of some combination of necessity, curiosity, and memory. Even something as seemingly fundamental as fish and chips is the product of multiple fusions, brought to Britain by way of the Netherlands by Spanish and Portuguese Jewish immigrants. I often find that in the food world, outsiders to a particular cuisine are more likely to obsess over authenticity than insiders. In the South Asian enclaves of Wembley, you might find a wholly inauthentic fusion menu of Indian pizzas. A few miles down the road, a fancy central London venue might advertise hyper regional Indian dishes and straight-from-the-source ingredients. Pinpointing what is authentic is always a slippery game. Often, it can be limiting rather than deepening.

The history of the world is a history of collision and transformation, although of late it’s become increasingly self-conscious. The very serious industry publication Modern Restaurant Management Magazine recently reported on the rise of “global fusion” on quick-service restaurant menus. It’s the more-diverse-than-ever Gen-Z generation who are the prime target for such antics. “If you’re featuring a bold, aspirational flavour,” they advise, “pair it with one or two familiar menu items like chicken nuggets or french fries.” This feels reminiscent of something immigrant food proprietors have long done as a clever economic and social ballast: Chinese takeaways serving fish and chips, or kebab shops ensuring there’s pizza on the menu. Fusion – for so long a dirty word – is back in vogue.

I’m for it. Kedgeree, in particular, is due for a moment in the sun. Why should it be spared from the family-recipe-to-trendy-restaurant pipeline? I’ve seen it in an old-school Hebridean restaurant serving nostalgic Scottish dishes, but aesthetically it’s stuck in the 1970s. In fact, in season four of The Crown, Margaret Thatcher unironically prepares it for her cabinet members while complaining about the commonwealth nations. Things are beginning to change: a few years ago a new wave London restaurant started selling a khichdi/kedgeree mash-up as part of a “modern Indian” small plates concept. If storied cuisines inevitability, eventually, turn into sellable cultural capital, then let’s at least embrace kedgeree as an object lesson.

So perhaps it is time to bring back the first Indian dining establishment in Britain – the Hindoostane Coffee House, opened in 1810 in Marylebone by an enterprising Bengali surgeon. It could be resurrected with pastel-hued, minimalist decor and a new sharing menu of Anglo-Indian cuisine. Delicious, educational, and just ironic enough. It might feature an on-trend kedgeree, made with butter beans, black rice, and those funky tins of Portuguese sardines. Maybe soft-boiled eggs instead, and a drizzle of bright, saffron-infused oil? (For Instagram, you need colour, definition, shape.) The constituent parts could be arranged in neat columns, like those vibrant chopped salads, to be mixed on-demand by the consumer. Or what about a version made with arborio rice, nutmeg, and basil – call it Marco Polo on the Coromandel. I might suggest it to Modern Restaurant Management.