Samsa Period COrigin theory CVerified

Samsa is a triangular baked parcel: kneaded wheat dough wrapped around a filling of lamb and onion, then baked at high heat in a clay oven called a tandoor. It has long been an easy bite on Central Asian street corners and in the chaikhana, the teahouses where people gather.

The wheat, the lamb, and the onion that go into it are all ingredients long available in Central Asia. The cook folds them into a filling, seals it in dough, and presses the parcel onto the inner wall of the tandoor to bake. The oven's fierce radiant heat cooks the dough all at once, crisping the outside while the meat juices stay sealed within the filling. The same filling fried in oil becomes a different food altogether; it is the choice to bake in an oven that gives this samsa its shape.

Fresh from the oven it is hot and can be carried in one hand. As a snack to nibble over a cup of tea, it settled into the everyday life of the street.

The lineage of baked samsa runs back to sanbusaj, the triangular stuffed pastry that spread across the medieval Islamic world. The word derives from the Persian sanbōsag, and in the written record it appears in the ninth-century verse of the Abbasid poet Ishaq al-Mawsili. A tenth-century Baghdad cookery book, that of Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq, collects several recipes for it, and there the pastries are fried.

As the pastry passed into the Turkic lands of Central Asia, it is thought to have moved from the frying pan to the clay tandoor, filled with mutton and onion, becoming the samsa eaten there today.

The fried samosa loved across South Asia shares that same sanbusaj ancestry. What the contemporary records establish is a direction of travel, from Central Asia and the Persianate world into South Asia. Amir Khusrau, who died around 1300, praised the samosa enjoyed at the court of the Delhi Sultanate, and Ibn Battuta's Rihla describes samūsa served in 1333 at a feast given by a Sultanate official on the road from Multan to Delhi: minced meat with almonds, walnuts, pistachios, onion and spices, wrapped in pastry and fried in butter (Defrémery and Sanguinetti's edition of the Arabic text with French translation, tome III, pp. 123-124).

A further claim often follows: that the tandoor-baked samsa of Central Asia is the ancestor from which the fried samosa descends. The sources do not carry it. Al-Warrāq's tenth-century sanbusaj are fried, the fourteenth-century South Asian pastry is fried as well, and no contemporary source describing the tandoor-baked samsa itself has yet been found. The samsa said to have been sold in the markets of Samarkand and Bukhara belongs to later tradition rather than to any record made at the time, and the sanbusa in Bayhaqi's eleventh-century Tarikh-i Bayhaqi was served at a Ghaznavid court banquet in Khurasan, not in Samarkand and not baked. When the baked line and the fried line parted, and which came first, is not documented.