Travelers in India who are not searching for themselves often instead come searching for culinary transcendence. The possible food quests are endless, something I’ve learned over the course of repeat reporting trips to the country, and I visited Delhi in October with an agenda of my own. I looked forward to local delicacies, like chhole bhature, a fried-bread-and-chickpea breakfast, and daulat ki chaat, sweetened milk froth with pistachios and cardamon. But there was one food I anticipated more than any other, a taste I had been craving since I first visited India a year before. It was then, on an impossibly humid day in Bangalore, that I sought relief in the freezer box of a local shop and found that is was full of butterscotch ice cream cones.

Butterscotch is commonly thought to be Scottish in origin, or at least contain Scotch, but those are probably myths. Another theory has it that its name comes from “scorch” — a reference to how it is made, by heating brown sugar with butter to the soft-crack stage of caramelization. Regardless, it’s a flavor few think of as Indian. It lacks Indian cooking’s signature spices, like saffron, ginger, clove and cardamom, but nevertheless butterscotch ice cream is available from the tip of the subcontinent to the Himalayas. After I discovered the cones in Bangalore, I ate them everywhere I went. I even wolfed a few down in Shravanabelagola, a holy Jain town where the most devout nuns and monks renounce all food and starve themselves to death.

Of course, I hadn’t come back to India just to eat ice cream, but it was something I could count on wherever my reporting took me. From Delhi, I went first to Haridwar, a sacred Hindu city; then to Amritsar, where Sikhs worship at the Golden Temple; then to the Muslim city Srinagar in Kashmir; and finally to Leh, a Buddhist city in the Himalayas. Across cultures and climates, I found the same cones everywhere. A paper wrapper identified the brand, like Amul, Creambell and Kwality Wall’s, but there was little difference between them. The waffle cone was usually chewy and lined with chocolate; the ice cream was pale yellow, like churned butter, and topped with more chocolate and crumbled nuts.

Like disco music in Italy or Kit Kat bars in Japan, butterscotch is one of those cultural exports that, by some coincidence of taste or style, comes to seem more authentic in its overseas market. “Despite the name, most of us treat butterscotch as Indian,” says Pushpesh Pant, the author of “India: The Cookbook.” Butterscotch almost certainly came to India with the British, but the flavor was redolent of traditional Indian sweets. The common Indian combination of ghee and jaggery, a natural sweetener, produces a rich and nutty taste similar to butter and brown sugar. “As you enjoy butterscotch, you subliminally recall chikki in Mumbai or chewy sohan halva from Delhi,” Pant told me.