If you’re walking down one of the main arterial roads in Calcutta, you might miss a small cubbyhole food store that draws a crowd for just a few hours a day. Here, they serve delectable, crispy Bengali cauliflower samosas, or phulkopir shingara, filled with lightly spiced cauliflower and cumin. A few kilometers away near AC Market, you’ll find larger, deep-fried samosas stuffed with a spicy, dark potato filling. And just around the corner, at a Gujarati snack stall, you can pick up tiny, crispy onion samosas. Samosas – those irresistible triangles of deep-fried crispy flour parcels filled with spiced potatoes, cauliflower, or, my personal favorite, perfectly seasoned minced meat – are the ultimate snack, pure comfort food. Across India, the samosa takes on various forms. In Hyderabad, you’ll find the “lukhmi,” with a thicker crust and minced meat filling. In South India, samosas are packed with cabbage, carrots, and curry leaves. In Bengal, "shingara" are slightly sweet and spicy, filled with diced potatoes and peanuts or delicately flavored cauliflower. Gujarati samosas are bite-sized, with diverse fillings like onion, French beans, and sweet peas. In Goa, the "chamuças" are spiced with minced beef, chicken, or pork. in a Yemeni restaurant in Washington i ate sanbusa. it was baked so very tasty. The sanbusa was introduced in India via Central Asia by traders. sambūsa, is a Persian word which means 'having equal sides' In India it was adopted & adapted to become samosa and is deep fried.… pic.twitter.com/Fdtyi7dESh — Rana Safvi رعنا राना (@iamrana) October 3, 2024 But, is samosa truly an Indian creation? Or do we have a foreign hand to thank, as usual? After all, the samosa is not unique to India. Just a few days ago, author Rana Safvi praised a “sanbusa” she enjoyed at a Yemeni restaurant. Israel has a version of samosas stuffed with mashed chickpeas. The Maldives, unsurprisingly, has a variation filled with tuna or fish mixed with onions. According to Safvi, we should thank Central Asian traders for introducing the sambūsa to India. The word "samosa" closely resembles the Persian sambūsa, meaning “having equal sides.” Historical records, like the 15th-century Persian manuscript Nimatnama prepared for Sultan Ghiyasuddin Shah of Malwa, mention the dish. Around AD 1300, Indo-Persian scholar Amir Khusrau noted samosas made with meat, ghee, and onions, while the 14th-century traveller Ibn Batuta described the samusak “minced meat cooked with almonds, walnuts, pistachios, onions and spices placed inside a thin envelope of wheat and deep fried in ghee”. By the 16th century, Abu Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari mentioned the qutab, a meat-filled dish, “which the people of Hind call the sanbusa”. Food historian KT Achaya suggests that while these descriptions imply the samosa was introduced by foreign courts, the dish may have been adapted to local tastes in India. I tend to agree—though India likely had its versions of the samosa, foreign travelers and settlers enriched the recipe, perhaps replacing meat with more affordable potatoes and vegetables, making it accessible to all communities. It’s just that we tweaked it to our tastes and cultural preferences, replacing meat with potatoes and vegetables, which are both cheaper and eaten by all communities. Whatever the genesis, I would recommend everyone indulge in a little taste of samosa now and then, fitness and health be damned. Next week, given that it’s Diwali, I’ll be writing about one of my favourite sweets and one that is generously gifted to family and friends: barfi—different kinds, the genesis of barfi, and more.
