Samosa Period BOrigin theory BVerified

The word samosa goes back to the Persian sanbosag ("triangular parcel"). Arab cookbooks of the tenth to thirteenth centuries record fried parcels stuffed with minced meat and nuts as sanbusak or sanbusaj, and the eleventh-century Tarikh-i Bayhaqi mentions sambosa.

It reached South Asia in the era of the Delhi Sultanate (thirteenth to fourteenth centuries). Cooks from Central Asia and the Middle East entered the court kitchens and brought this fried parcel with them. The court poet Amir Khusrau (c. 1300) wrote of the samosa (filled with meat, ghee, and onion) that was loved at court, and the traveller Ibn Battuta (fourteenth century) noted the sambusak served at the court of Muhammad bin Tughluq.

The wheat used for the pastry was a long-established local crop of South Asia, and it was not what set the timing of the samosa's emergence. The original form was, after all, a fried parcel filled with minced meat. Sealed in a kneaded wheat casing and fried in oil, it needed neither plate nor cutlery and could be carried even when cold. That is precisely why it did not stay in the court kitchen: it became something you could hawk in the market, and it came down into the streets as everyday snack food.

Within about two centuries of its arrival, the samosa put down roots as a dish of South Asia itself. The Niʿmatnama, a cookbook compiled for a ruler of the Malwa Sultanate (c. 1500), sets down a method for making the samosa, showing that this fried parcel was actually being cooked in courts of the subcontinent. And the Mughal court record Ain-i-Akbari (1590) notes a stuffed pastry as "what the people of Hindustan call sanbusah." By this time the snack that had come from outside was already a local food known by a local name.

Many people think of the samosa as an Indian invention. The triangular fried parcel is now a national favourite in India and looks like a dish rooted in the soil. But trace its name and its history, and the needle points outside India, toward Central Asia and Persia.

The clue lies in the name of the dish itself. Samosa goes back to the Persian sanbosag, "triangular parcel." Medieval Arab cookbooks record triangular fried parcels stuffed with minced meat and nuts, and eleventh-century Persian records show the same family of food. Before this dish appeared in India, it was already on the tables of West Asia.

It crossed into South Asia in the age of the sultans who ruled Delhi. Cooks invited from Central Asia and the Middle East entered the court kitchens and brought their home fried parcel with them. A poet in service at court wrote down this snack, filled with meat and ghee and onion and much loved, and a traveller who ranged across many lands also recorded it served at a king's court. Sealed in a kneaded wheat casing and fried in oil, the parcel needed neither plate nor cutlery and could be carried even when cold. That is why it did not stay in the court kitchen but became, in time, something to be hawked in the market and came down into the streets as snack food.

The foreign snack eventually took root in this land. A cookbook compiled for the Malwa court (c. 1500) records how to make the samosa, and a Mughal court record (1590) writes of a stuffed pastry as "what the people of Hindustan call sanbusah." Within two centuries the parcel that came from Central Asia had become a local food known by a local name.

The potato-filled vegetarian version taken as typical of India today is a later shape still. The potato reached South Asia from the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In other words, that quintessentially "Indian" filling is itself a later, local reworking, a change of clothes the incoming parcel put on in this land. The view that the samosa is an Indian invention spread as a belief that was never backed by firm sources; its true starting point lies in the portable snack food of Central Asia and Persia.