Aloo kachori Period COrigin theory CVerified

Until the potato reached the interior

Aloo kachori is a wheat-shelled fried pastry stuffed with potato mashed and tossed with spices. The dough, and the folding-and-frying that seals it, are no different from the lentil-filled kachori. What changes is the filling.

The potato is a New World crop. It first reached India in the early seventeenth century, brought by the Portuguese to the western coast, and over the course of the nineteenth century, under British rule, its cultivation spread into the North Indian interior. In the hill station of Shimla it was planted from 1828, and only in the later nineteenth century did the tuber become common on everyday tables. Until the potato was something you could buy without a thought at a street stall, a potato-stuffed kachori had no way of coming into being.

Today it is sold as a street food across a wide swathe of the north — Uttar Pradesh, Agra, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.

The lineage behind the snack reaches back into medieval India. The twelfth-century encyclopedia Manasollasa (1127-1138) records purika, a fried disc of dough, along with dumplings of urad lentil. The word kachori itself surfaces in the early seventeenth century, in the autobiography of the merchant Banarasidas, the Ardhakathanaka (completed 1641), which recalls the months he spent buying kachori from a street seller (the lentil-filled kachori carries that story). Drawn by that antiquity, people sometimes speak of the potato-stuffed aloo kachori as being just as old.

But the potato is a New World crop, and it did not touch South Asian soil until the seventeenth century at the earliest. It became available in the North Indian interior later still, in the nineteenth. However old the line of fried snacks, the potato filling appeared only after the crop had taken root in India.

The earliest mention of the potato in India comes from Edward Terry, who traveled with the Roe embassy in the early seventeenth century, and a 1675 record places it at a feast in Ajmer. But that is the potato as a courtly and garden curiosity, a world apart from the everyday food of the common people that a street snack would rest on. What is more, the European word 'potato' in this period could be confused with the sweet potato. The white potato of aloo kachori reached the ordinary people of North India under British rule in the nineteenth century, promoted in cultivation by the East India Company, and became common fare only in that century's later decades.