Sea, Salt and Spice is a definitive culinary biography of Mumbai - a city shaped as much appetite as by tides and trade. Long before it became shorthand for ambition, excess and overcrowded trains, Bombay was a porous island city, its kitchens stocked by fishermen, merchants, settlers and empire.

With curiosity and flair, Meher Mirza traces this history through what was cooked, preserved, traded and eaten: from Koli hearths and Peshwa courts to Portuguese enclaves, colonial ports and the restless streets of the late twentieth century. Moving nimbly across centuries, she shows how geography, climate, gender, religion, caste and commerce worked their way into everyday meals.

Richly illustrated with maps, photographs and archival texts, Sea, Salt and Spice blends scholarship with storytelling, wit with insight. This is not a guide to what to eat or where to eat it, but a spirited biography of a city - one that finally gives Mumbai, and its food, their due.