Interesting facts about the samosa, a tasty Indian snack.
Ask any Indian what his favorite snack is and he’ll tell you that it’s a flaky pastry stuffed with spiced potatoes or minced meat, fried to perfection and served with a dollop of tangy chutney and a cup of masala chai (spiced tea). Samosa, as this golden triangle is called, is by far the most enduring and endearing of Indian snacks.
Samosas in Different Regions
Traditionally samosas have triangular or conical shapes, but the type of filling varies from one region to another. Visit a tea-shop in North India and you can sample large, sumptuous samosas stuffed with potatoes, pomegranate and plump raisins and spiked with cumin. Bihari sweet shops dish out a thick-cased variety of samosa filled with ginger-spiked potatoes and chopped chilies, while Hyderabadi samosa vendors serve a smaller version of the samosa with a crisp pastry crust and mince-filled center. If you relish subtle flavors, tuck into a plate of piping-hot Bengali ‘shingara’ (the Bengali word for samosa), which is made with a light-puff pastry that melts in your mouth to release the flavors of delicately seasoned potatoes and cauliflower.
From miniature cocktail samosas filled with minced-meat, cheese or potatoes, subtly seasoned with herbs to large, bursting-at-the-seams samosas stuffed with a spicy mixture of potatoes, peas and peanuts, and generously spiked with chilies, ginger and cumin, you’ll find a variety of samosas in chai-shops (tea shops) and sweet shops along the highways and by-lanes of India. You can even make a batch of samosas at home. Try this simple samosa recipe.
A Helping of History
It’s interesting to note that a snack that is such a hot favorite with Indians actually originated in Central Asia and traveled all the way to India in saddle bags through the ancient trade routes. According to samosa-connection, a website about this scrumptious snack, “small, crisp mince-filled triangles were easy to make around campfires during night halts, then conveniently packed into saddle-bags as snacks for the next day’s journey.”
The Samosa in Ancient Texts
Ancient Arab cookery books of the 10th to 13th centuries refer to the pastries as ‘sanbusak’, ‘sanbusaq’ or ‘sanbusaj’, which originated from the Persian word, ‘sanbosag’. In 1334, Ibn Battuta, a traveler, described the ‘sanbusak’ as minced meat cooked with almonds, pistachios, onions and spices, placed inside a thin envelope of wheat and deep-fried in ghee.
The well-known poet of Delhi royalty Amir Khusrao, observed that the royalty relished samosas cooked with meat, ghee and onions. The Ain-i-Akbari also declared the samosa as a favourite snack.
So, next time you feel like snacking, buy some samosas or fry yourself a batch of golden samosas and relish them with a cup of tea.
