When Pamela Timms left Scotland 10 years ago to move to India with her husband and children, it would have been easy for her to live a comfortable expatriate existence, shielded from the heat and dust. But her interest in food led her to begin a blog eatanddust.com in 2009, and start exploring the streets and back alleys of old Delhi. It hasn't always been easy - one season she has to withstand oppressive heat, the next, torrential monsoon downpours (which at least wash away the dust). And always, of course, there are hordes of people.

Timms, a journalist by profession, approaches the dishes she finds with an outsider's curiosity and a reporter's quest for answers. Who, she asks, are the men who gave their names to Ashok & Ashok Meat Dhaba - a no-frills, unhygienic shop that she loves for its mutton korma, which sells out every day within an hour. There are rumours that the two Ashoks were gangsters who became upstanding citizens - either, as one story goes, because they had an epiphany while witnessing someone doing a good deed and decided they'd rather feed people than hurt them, or because they won the shop in a card game. The teller of the latter story, an acquaintance of Timms, says that the men didn't know how to cook, so they came to him and he taught them to make mutton korma; he then proceeds to make his version of the dish, which tastes remarkably similar to the Ashok & Ashok version (and, yes, Timms gives the recipe).