Living in London gives you access to just about any food you fancy, yet there's one thing expat Glaswegian Audrey Gillan hungers for that you just can't seem to find down south...

They called them indescribables: clusters of gram flour-battered vegetables, little bombs of spice, deep-fried so that they were crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. "Pakora? What are they like?" the novice peruser of Indian-restaurant menus would ask back in the 1970s. "Well, madam, they’re indescribable," the waiter might say. And so the indescribable pakora became a Glasgow phenomenon.

Pakoras are my madeleines. Give me a good one, ‘jaggy’ with protruding curls of onion, peppered with whole cumin and coriander seeds, and I’m three years old again, beside my young parents, who’ve taken me to a fancy restaurant called The Shenaz. It’s all flock wallpaper, with a coat-check guy in a turban and turny-uppy pointy shoes. I’m given a side plate and a small taste of everything they order. I eat it all, but it is pakora that steals my heart. Glasgow pakora. A very different kind of pakora. I ask Marina O’Loughlin, the Glasgow-born food critic, why it is that our native city’s pakora is just better and her face turns as if in holy rapture. "Oh my god. It’s the crispness, the squidge, the heat, the strange, chalky dip. It’s just not like any pakora I’ve had anywhere else," she says, before bursting out laughing at her next thought. "The idea of selling a giant plateful of vegetables to Glaswegians who would never order vegetables is remarkable." 

I too worked in an Indian restaurant, albeit not for free, and the man who operated the tandoor was the god of the kitchen. Balbir’s India Brasserie was one of the best in the city, the upmarket sister of the hugely popular Ashoka. On a Friday and Saturday night, aside from waiting the tables, it was my job to make the pakora sauce; at Balbir’s it was a mixture of tomato ketchup, vinegar and dried mint from a jar. The chalky sauce Marina loves features yoghurt instead of vinegar. I laugh when I think of another of my jobs: to roll up facecloths, wet them, and spray them with air freshener (think Glade, not essential oils). 

In my flat in Spitalfields, London, I pull a tatty, greased-up copy of the Shish Mahal Cook Book (published in 1982) down from the shelf. In it, the restaurant’s then owner, Ali Aslam, explains: "The European tradition of serving a starter before the main meal is not customary in Indian or Pakistani households. The pakora is considered a snack, something to tide you over until dinner time. You can buy them in the street from traders who will fry them freshly for you, rather as you would expect to buy a hot dog, or hamburger, in this country; but there the similarity ends."

I now live a chapati’s toss from Brick Lane, home of curry in London. Yet I still crave that Glasgow pakora. For here, it is a different beast altogether: fat, doughy, and fried just once a day, not to order – they reheat with a ding in the microwave. It is not, for me, a remembrance of things past.

Glasgow-raised broadcaster and restaurant owner Hardeep Singh Kohli explains what he thinks the difference is: "Pakora is North Indian – more filling than batter. The Bangladeshi version is all batter and no filling. So, the Punjabi pakora is more akin to a fritter whereas the Bangladeshi pakora sold on Brick Lane, or South Indian bhaji, is a celebration of batter."

I go to Arzu, a shop on Brick Lane selling savouries and sweetmeats, to buy a box of pakora: onion, potato, mixed, chilli and aubergine. I take them to share with Isaac McHale in his basement office at the Clove Club. We poke them about a bit. They are deeply troubling, flaccid things that need a really good run-in with a chip pan. Our faces fall. "I want it to be jaggy, not big and fluffy," huffs Isaac. They might call them pakora but they’re just not indescribables. We’re booking a train ticket home.