In 1805, Michael Hogan moved to the US after making a fortune while trading with the East India Company. The Irish ship captain bought land and settled in a town in northwestern Franklin County, and interestingly, named it after his Indian wife's birthplace. In 2017, when former actor and chef Tara Deshpande — who has a penchant for collecting old, dog-eared recipe books — came across The Bombay Cook Book at a yard sale in New York, she began a frantic search for Bombay High School, to which the book was ascribed. "Then, I realised, that it wasn't the Bombay in India," she shares. And that's how Deshpande discovered a little town in the US called Bombay that Hogan so lovingly dedicated to his wife, who hailed from present-day Mulund.

"I am a bookworm, and for a long time, I used to collect first editions penned by my favourite authors. But when I was in New York, I became interested in the British influence on American food. So, I would go to a lot of estate and yard sales and pick up vintage cookbooks from there. There was so much information in them, and yet, most copies have not been digitised [or preserved]," she shares, ahead of launching a range of dishes, desserts and soups that will be available on order and that hark back to the culinary aesthete of India's colonial past.