How is one to capture the essence of a samosa through the written word?
Growing up my favourite samosa had to be the one sold at my school tuck shop owned by Mr. Wellows. Anyone who went to the missionary schools in Karachi has had to have tasted the legendary alloo ka samosa sold at their canteens.
It was golden brown, crisp, flaky, delicious all at 40 paisas only! And if the school samosa wasn’t enough our chowkidar used to make the best homemade samosas, hence I’ve literally grown up on samosas.
But does the samosa really belong to the subcontinent?
No, it does not, to our utmost chagrin it migrated from Central Asia. Yes, yet another immigrant food on the desi plate that has adjusted so well to its adoptive land.
The immigrant samosa travelled the length and breath of the region and came to the subcontinent along the ancient trade routes of Central Asia.
The Oxford Companion To Food by Alan Davidson says;
The Indian [subcontinent] samosa is merely the best known of an entire family of stuffed pastries or dumplings popular from Egypt and Zanzibar to Central Asia and West China. Arab cookery books of the 10th and 13th centuries refer to the pastries as sanbusak (the pronunciation still current in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon), sanbusaq or sanbusaj, all reflecting the early medieval form of the Persian word sanbosag, though originally it was named samsa, after the triangular pyramids of Central Asia.
Like the Egyptian falafel, the samsa was also a travellers snack.
Also read: Food Stories: Falafel
The wanderers and travellers of ancient days cooked the keema stuffed samsas, roasted it on open flames and enjoyed it as a travel snack, and a long way it has come.
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From travel snack to chai time, king of the iftar table and more importantly, an ever present item in almost all refrigerators in desi households.
So what happened after and how did the favourite desi snack evolve in the ancient days of Delhi?
It is said that the snack became such an intrinsic and favoured menu item in the royal kitchens of the 14th century dynasty of Muhammad Tughlaq, that he often requested for them to be made with onions, ghee and meat.
The poet Amir Khusrao wrote that the Delhi royalty enjoyed the snack immensely, and that tradition continues today from Delhi to Lahore and Karachi to Mumbai.
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My wonderfully delicious samosa food journey took me to the days of the travelling Ibn Battuta who famously quoted the following about the sambusak, another name for the samosa; a near perfect description:
Minced meat cooked with almonds, pistachios, onions and spices placed inside a thin envelop of wheat and deep-fried in ghee and was served before the third course of pulao in the royal house of Tughluq.
A few hundred years after the honourable mention by Ibn Battuta, the sanbusa was mentioned by Abul Fazl in the famed Akbarnama also known as the Ain-e-Akbari. Abul Fazl said that a “wheat dish qutab is also something the royals love, which the people of Hind call the sanbusah. That which we call a samosa, by any other name would taste as delicious”.
In Spanish a similar kind of pastry is called empanadas, and initially when I moved away from Pakistan and craved the samosa I would happily settle for these, the stepbrother of the samosa.
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When it was time for me to make samosas I turned to Shazli Auntie's recipe. The end result: heavenly. Here it is from my kitchen to yours.
Ingredients (for 12 pieces)
2 cups flour
4 tbsp. oil
12 to 14 tbsp. water
1 tsp. carom seeds
Salt to taste
Oil for frying
Potato Stuffing: Boil 3 medium sized potatoes. Once boiled, peel, add salt to taste, ½ tsp cumin, ¼ tsp red chillie powder, 1 tsp chopped cilantro, ¼ tsp chopped green chillie, fried onions, ½ tsp carom seeds, ½ tsp crushed coriander seeds, mash together and fry on high heat in 4 tbsp. oil for a few minutes.
Keema Stuffing: Brown ½ medium sized onion in 2 to 3 tbsp oil, once golden brown add 1 lbs ground meat, ½ tsp cumin, ½ tsp chillie powder, ½ tsp garam masala, ½ tsp ginger and garlic paste and salt to taste. Cook on medium heat for 15 to 20 minutes, raising the heat to high and stirring constantly for another 5 minutes or until the oil separates from the meat.
Method
Mix all ingredients for shell, and then knead for 10 minutes forming dough, cover with damp cloth and set aside for an hour in room temperature.
Divide into 6 equal dough balls, make 6 round rotis, cut into semi circle and on the straight edge of the sliced roti apply some water and fold to form a seal.
Stuff the prepared samosa cone with the potato, or mince stuffing and apply water on the round samosa cone circumference and pinch edges to seal.
Slide samosa in hot oil (at full heat), and turning heat to low after dropping samosa in fryer and until it turns golden brown. Increase heat to hot again and remove from fryer. Drain and enjoy.
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—Photos by Fawad Ahmed