Tradition · street snack
Samosa
/səmoːsɑː/
Also known as Samosā, Sambusa, Sambusak, Sanbusaj, Samushak, Sanbusah, Singara, Shingara, Samsa, Chamuça
The samosa is a fried pastry turnover, now usually filled with spiced potato and peas, whose name goes back to Middle Persian sambosag, 'triangular pastry'. It reached India as a meat-filled court dish of the Delhi Sultanate, cooked by chefs from Central Asia and the Middle East, and can be followed through Amir Khusrau, Ibn Battuta, the Malwa sultans' cookbook and the Ain-i-Akbari before it became the snack of canteens and railway platforms. In Bengal it is singara, after the tetrahedral water-caltrop fruit.
- Date
- 1300–None
- Function
- Trade & production
- Material
- flour pastry; meat, or potato and peas; ghee or oil
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The samushak that Ibn Battuta ate at Muhammad bin Tughlaq's table was a small pie of minced meat with almonds, pistachios and walnuts, served before the pulao. Two and a half centuries later the Ain-i-Akbari's recipe still used meat, flour, ghee, onions, fresh ginger, pepper and coriander.
Pushpesh Pant notes that Khusrau's mention is used to argue that the samosa is a foreign import, while others cite Sanskrit texts for an indigenous ancestor; the Persian derivation of the name itself is not disputed.
Connections (5)
- Court associationAmir Khusrau
Amir Khusrau (1253–1325), royal poet of the Delhi Sultanate, wrote around 1300 that the princes and nobles enjoyed the samosa 'prepared from meat, ghee, onion and so on'. It is the earliest Indian notice of the dish, and it places the samosa at court rather than in the street: a Central Asian samsa brought by chefs from the Middle East and Central Asia who cooked in the sultans' kitchens. Pushpesh Pant notes that this passage is the usual evidence for the samosa as an import.
- Court associationMuhammad bin Tughlaq
Ibn Battuta describes a state banquet at Muhammad bin Tughlaq's court: diners seated on carpets, plates of gold and silver, roast meat, then breads with sweet spreads, and before the third course the samushak or sambusak, small pies of minced meat cooked with almonds, pistachios, walnuts and spices, followed by pulao and a whole roast fowl. Jiggs Kalra and Pushpesh Pant suggest the modern samosa descends from this court pie of Persian origin.
- Court associationMandu
The Ni'matnama-i Nasir al-Din Shahi, a Persian cookbook begun for Ghiyath Shah, who ruled the Malwa Sultanate from Mandu between 1469 and 1500, explains the art of making samosas, and its paintings show them being prepared and served. The book was finished for his son Nasir Shah after Ghiyath was forced to abdicate. It records the samosa in a provincial sultan's kitchen two centuries after Khusrau's Delhi notice and a century before Akbar's household manual.
- Historical linkAbu’l-Fazl
Abu'l-Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari, the account of Akbar's household and administration, gives a recipe for qutab, 'which the people of Hindustan call sanbusah': ten seers of meat, four of flour, two of ghee and one of onions, with fresh ginger, salt, pepper and coriander. The entry shows that in the late sixteenth century the Persian court name and the Indian popular name were both current, and that the samosa of the Mughal kitchen was still a meat pastry.
- AnalogueJalebi
Samosa and jalebi came by the same route and now travel together. Both appear in the same Baghdad book, Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq's tenth-century Kitab al-Tabikh, as sanbusaj and zalabiya, and both names are Persian or Arabic. In India they became a pair: Pushpesh Pant writes that in many small towns the samosa-jalebi combination means jalapana or kaleva, breakfast or tiffin on the go, and in Pakistan jalebis are eaten with evening tea, sometimes alongside samosas.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Samosa" and "Ni'matnāmah Naṣir al-Dīn Shāhī". Pushpesh Pant, "Savoury temptations", The Tribune (5 September 2004). Jiggs Kalra & Pushpesh Pant, "Regal Repasts", India Today (1999). Abu'l-Fazl, Ain-i-Akbari, tr. H. Blochmann, vol. 1, p. 59. Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (2014).
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