Samosa

• 1. Introduction

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  The samosa, today a fried snack sold hot beside fresh chutneys across the Indian subcontinent, once appeared at a royal banquet in the 14th century. The traveller Ibn Battuta described a meal at the court of Muhammad bin Tughluq. Before the third course of pulao, a small pie called samushak or sambusak was served. It was stuffed with minced meat, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, and spices. That luxurious pie belongs to the same family as the pocket-sized snack sold on streets today. How did a courtly pastry become everyday street food? Why does it carry a Persian name? And why do cooks from Burma to Portugal each have their own version of it?

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• 2. A Persian Word

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  The word samosa begins with sambosag, a Middle Persian term meaning "triangular pastry". English took it from the Hindustani samosa, written in Devanagari as समोसा. Arabic kept the Persian root as sambusak, and medieval Arabic recipe books sometimes spell it sambusaj. Every one of these forms was borrowed from Persian. Because the name describes a shape rather than a filling, it could travel with potatoes, paneer, meat, fish, or even chocolate.

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• 3. Baked Before Fried

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  Ishaq al-Mawsili, a poet of the Abbasid era, wrote the earliest known mention of a samosa precursor. His subject was the sanbusaj, and he praised it in verse. That medieval Middle Eastern ancestor was baked, not deep-fried, and the Indian and Pakistani samosa is believed to descend from it.

  Arab cookery books from the 10th to the 13th century carry recipes under the names sanbusak, sanbusaq, and sanbusaj. All of them derive from the Persian sanbosag. Abu'l-Fadl Bayhaqi, an Iranian historian who lived from 995 to 1077, mentioned the dish in his history book, Tarikh-i Bayhaqi.

  In Iran the pastry stayed popular until the 16th century. By the 20th century its popularity had shrunk to certain provinces, such as the sambusas of Larestan. Far to the east, the same pastry was about to find new patrons.

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• 4. Sultanate Kitchens

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  In the 13th or 14th century, chefs from the Middle East and Central Asia brought the Central Asian samsa to the Indian subcontinent. They cooked in the royal kitchens of the rulers of the Delhi Sultanate.

  Amir Khusrau, a scholar and royal poet who lived from 1253 to 1325, wrote around the year 1300 about the court's tastes. He said that princes and nobles enjoyed the "samosa prepared from meat, ghee, onion, and so on".

  A medieval Indian cookbook, the Ni'matnāmah Naṣir al-Dīn Shāhī, was started for Ghiyath Shah, ruler of the Malwa Sultanate in central India. It too mentions the art of making samosa. The Ain-i-Akbari, a 16th-century Mughal document, gives a recipe for qottab, which it says "the people of Hindustan call sanbúsah".

  Palace patronage was only part of the story. The samosa spread because it tasted good and travelled well, a pocket-sized snack that workers and travellers across India, Pakistan, and Central Asia could buy almost anywhere.

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• 5. Across the Subcontinent

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  Maida, the all-purpose flour of the subcontinent, wraps most samosas made there. The filling is often diced or mashed boiled potatoes mixed with onions, green peas, lentils, ginger, spices, and green chillies. The whole pastry is deep-fried in vegetable oil until golden brown. It is served hot, often as chaat street food with fresh chutneys. Depending on the region, the shape may be a triangle, a cone, or a crescent. Fillings can be vegetarian or not, and cheese such as paneer, meat, or fish all appear. Sweet versions use traditional Indian flavours or even chocolate.

  In the Indian states of Assam, Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar, and Jharkhand, the local form is called singara or shingra. It is a little smaller than samosas elsewhere in India. Its filling is cooked diced potato, peanuts, and sometimes raisins. In Hyderabad, a smaller version with a thicker crust and minced meat is called lukhmi.

  Bangladesh enjoys both flat triangular samosas and full-shaped ones, shaped like a tetrahedron. The Bengali full-shaped version is the shingara, usually smaller than the standard kind and filled with potatoes, vegetables, and nuts. In eastern Nepal the snack is called singadas, after the water caltrop it resembles. The rest of Nepal says samosa.

  Karachi has a variety called kaghazi samosa, or "paper samosa", named for a thin, crisp covering like a wonton or spring roll wrapper. Its fillings include beef, chicken, and lamb, or it can be made sweet. In the Maldives, the local samosa is called bajiyaa and is filled with tuna and onions.

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• 6. Central Asia and Middle East

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  In Uzbekistan, the samsa is a pastry stuffed with meat and sometimes vegetables, then baked in a tandoor oven instead of being fried. Tajik cuisine has sambusa-i varaki, triangular turnovers filled with minced beef or mutton mixed with tail fat. They are flavoured with onions and spices and also baked in a tandoor.

  The Arabic sambousek is usually filled with meat, onion, pine nuts, za'atar, spinach dock, or cheese. It is most popular during Ramadan. Iran's sambuseh gave rise to qottab, a sweet fried turnover. Modern Iranian sambuseh is made either with a filling of sausage and pizza cheese or with vegetables.

  In Hebrew the pastry is sambusak, and Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish cuisines have shaped it differently. Sephardi sambusak is generally thicker and baked, stuffed with cheese or beef, and coated with sesame or nigella seeds. The Mizrahi kind is thinner, larger, and fried, filled with curry-spiced chickpea and onion, and usually has no seed coating.

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• 7. Southeast Asia and Africa

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  In Burma, the samosa is samuza, and it is an extremely popular street snack. Cut samuza pieces also go into samuza thoke, a salad with onions, cabbage, fresh mint, a light potato and chickpea curry broth, masala, chili powder, salt, and lime. Indonesia has similar snacks called pastel, panada, and epok-epok.

  Across East Africa, samosas are popular under several variants of the name. In Somalia, sambuus filled with vegetables, meat, or seafood are eaten on special occasions. On Réunion, samoussas are filled with chicken, cheese, crabs, or potatoes.

  South African samoosas tend to be smaller than Indian ones. The same dough makes farmaas puri, a flatbread of rolled sheets stacked with minced meat, cut into thin circles, and deep fried. It originated in South Africa and spread to Gujarati communities in India and Pakistan, where it is popular during Ramadan.

  In West African countries such as Ghana and Nigeria, samosas are a common street food. Nigerian parties serve them with chicken or beef, puff puff, spring rolls, and plantains, a spread of finger foods called "small chops".

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• 8. Portuguese and English Names

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  In Goa, Portugal, and Angola, the samosa is known as the chamuça. It is filled with chicken, beef, pork, lamb, or vegetables and generally served quite hot. Chamuças are an integral part of Goan Catholic and Portuguese cuisine, where they are a common snack.

  The United Kingdom and the English-speaking Commonwealth, including Canada, also enjoy samosas, as does the United States. Spellings vary, from samboosa to sambusac, and in South Africa the usual word is samoosa. Samosas are popular snacks in South Asia and within the Indian diaspora across the world. Frozen samosas are increasingly easy to find, and some cooks now make variations with filo or flour tortillas.

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