More than 2,400 years ago, Indian merchants traveling along the Silk Road introduced the world to an aromatic rice dish that would later become the Persian staple, pilaf. A couple of millennia down the line, the Mughals brought the dish back to the subcontinent and turned it into biryani. Meanwhile in the East, the Portuguese were busy inventing the evergreen Bengali icon, the rosogulla. Between biryani and rosogulla, is a fascinating story of how foreign foods came to conquer India.