Puri Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Puri is an unleavened fried bread: whole-wheat dough rolled thin and round, then dropped into hot oil where it puffs up in an instant. It has long been loved across North India, as a festival offering and as an everyday plate alike.

The frame of this dish is a pair of plain materials—whole-wheat flour and cooking fat. Wheat, the main ingredient, is an old crop rooted deep in the soil of South Asia, on hand since ancient times and on everyday tables from early on. The materials were always there. What was still needed was the craft to turn this flour into a single fried bread.

Roll the dough thin, lower it into hot oil, and the steam trapped inside swells the thin skin into a round dome—this frying craft is what raised puri into a dish. And the craft itself was worked out in South Asia long ago. A method of rolling balls of wheat flour thin and frying them in oil is already written down in the Manasollasa, a twelfth-century encyclopedia (around 1120) by Someshvara III, king of the Western Chalukya dynasty. The lineage is told as reaching back further still. According to histories of Bengali food, Bengal under the Pala dynasty (eighth to twelfth centuries) had a fried wheat bread called shaskuli in three kinds: khasta, kneaded with fat; sapta, made without fat; and puri. Of these, puri is said to have grown into North India's puri, and khasta into luchi, Bengal's sister fried bread of refined flour. The name shaskuli also appears among the foods in an eleventh-century medical text of the Pala era, but that text does not say how it was made. Read along this lineage, whole-wheat puri and refined-flour luchi are equal sisters, branching from one old source.

Puri comes dogged by a splendid origin legend. A queen from one of the great ancient epics, the story runs, made a fried bread from the little wheat and the potatoes she had left during her years of exile—and that was the beginning of puri. As a tale it is charming, but there is a decisive tear in it. The potato is a New World crop, and it joined Indian tables only much later. In the distant past the epic describes, there was no potato at all. One ingredient has wandered into the heroine's anecdote from a far later age.

And when you follow the firm traces of fried wheat bread as a real dish, they surface not in the epic age but far downstream, in the medieval period. Nothing survives to show that a character from the epic invented this plate. The origin legend, in other words, is a founding tale knotted on afterward to lend the dish an old and glorious pedigree—a thing apart from its actual history.

Yet setting this story aside does not make puri a young dish. Quite the reverse. Once the heroic legend is put to one side, what emerges from behind it is a quiet, sure, old lineage that runs back to the fried wheat breads of the medieval period. Strip away the glamour of myth and puri loses none of its age. Only the source of its luster shifts—from legend to the historical record.