A survey of the dish as served by 66 Yorkshire takeaway outlets found that 27 per cent contained illegally high levels of artificial colour.

The findings were published by West Yorkshire Trading Standards and made headlines throughout UK newspaper and broadcast media.

Nearly all the curries were coloured with a cocktail of tartrazine (E102), sunset yellow (E110), ponceau 4R (E124), carmoisine (E122) and allura red (E129).

All these are targeted for phasing out by the The Food Standards Agency because of their harmful effects on children but there was no legal requirement for the takeaways to label the colours.

Researchers at Southampton University of Southampton have found evidence of increased levels of hyperactivity in young children consuming mixtures of some artificial food colours and the preservative sodium benzoate. Asthma, allergies, rashes, and gastric upsets have also been associated with the colourings.

The government’s Food Standards Agency has had some success in persuading food and drink manufacturers to stop using them. But Graham Hebblethwaite, West Yorkshire’s chief trading standards officer, said this was not the case with the takeaway curry trade.

The law currently allows curry sauces to contain up to 500mg/kg of artificial colour but one sample was found to contain five times this level.

Sweets are allowed to contain up to 300mg/kg of colour and the study showed the worst curry contained the colour equivalent of 3.6kg (8lb) of brightly coloured sweets.

Councillor Andrew Carter, of West Yorkshire Trading Standards Committee, said the guilty takeaways would be revisited and if they had not changed their ways they could be prosecuted.

Some restaurant owners have responded that they no longer use colouring.

One owner in Bradford said: “We don’t really use colouring at all. People have been phasing out the colouring for a while. The restaurants that use colouring have got a lot to hide in their food, but there are lots of top-quality restaurants where there is no problem. Colouring should be minimal.”

The closest I usually get to cooking Anand’s coconut and mustard prawns is making the sorrowful fish-finger sandwiches laden with ketchup I eat on a regular basis. Anand is attempting to haul me out of my food rut, a dark place littered with chocolate wrappers and empty Coke cans.

It isn’t that my mother didn’t cook Indian food. I remember her plucking the beady eye from pilchards, rolling roti and mixing spices but “you smell of curry” was a common insult in Manchester playgrounds in the 1980s, so the aromas did not make my mouth water but rather my blood boil. Although my single mother had a job, Indian food also seemed to represent a woman tied to the kitchen, duty bound. My fish-fingers, I thought as I brandished them aloft, would fend off any pigeonholing of me.

Now that I am a little older and beginning to suffer from lack of vegetables, I am keen to eat more healthily and learn more about my culinary heritage. It is changing attitudes such as mine that ensure Anand attracts the “brown pound” as well as a mainstream audience. “People ask me if [British] Indians buy my book, and of course they do. We were out there like everyone else, at university, and didn’t really spend time in the kitchen with our mums.”

When it comes to food, says Anand, we have shot ourselves in the foot. “We go to the gym to be healthy. We take vitamins to be healthy. But eating healthy food does most of the work for you.”

Anand’s popularity is largely due to the way she adapts traditional Indian recipes to help fit cooking good food into a hectic, modern lifestyle. “I don’t want to be in the kitchen for two hours making a vegetable stew, which is what my mother would do. I cook like someone of our generation. I lighten everything. I freshen everything,” she says.

Her television series and upcoming book, Anjum’s New Indian, aims to reveal the healthy aspects of Indian food and promote the diversity of regional dishes, eroding the preconceptions that she was surprised to discover on returning to England aged 15 from Switzerland, where she grew up. “I heard that stereotype of having a curry on a Friday night and I didn’t know what the hell it meant because, for me, Indian food is home food.” A “respect for ingredients” is her key philosophy.

Born in London, Anand dreamed of following in the footsteps of her businessman father. “I thought, ‘I’m going to do something with my life. I’m not going to be a housewife like my mother and her mother’.” After the age of 12 she never spent any time in the kitchen and went on to study business at university, ending up in a job she hated. “I saw myself living the rest of my life in this office. It was soul-destroying,” she says.

It was when Anand was trying to lose weight that she taught herself how to cook the food her mother used to make. She found that it was an activity she “absolutely loved” and began to write about it. She didn’t give up in the face of 30 rejections from publishers, and says that it was her tenacity, naivety, luck and sheer love of food that pulled her through. “Every time in my food career when I think it’s not working or it’s too slow, something keeps me at it.” Her first book, Indian Every Day: light, healthy Indian Food went on to sell more than 30,000 copies. Her last book, Indian Food Made Easy, toppled Harry Potter off the Amazon bestseller list.

“I’m happiest when cooking,” she muses, as a scrumptious scent spreads and my stomach rumbles rudely. “I love pottering about, looking at fresh ingredients. When I’m cooking I feel at peace. I feel contentment. It’s calming, methodical. You’re not trying to solve global poverty, you’re just chopping coriander.”

It is soon time to test the fruits of our labour. The coconut, coriander and mustard awaken taste buds I never knew I had. I dream about hosting a dinner party where there is not a fish finger in sight for, next, I shall attempt Keralan salmon wraps, followed by Goan prawn cake and perhaps then some battered Amritsari sole.