In honor of 92nd Street Y classes like the Curry Hill expedition of Mike Colameco’s Food Adventures (it’s more than Kalustyan’s, people!) and Makor’s 3-session Cooking With Indian Spices, we thought it might be time to pay tribute to the humble samosa.

The deep-fried, fist-sized triangular pastry is traditionally filled with either spicy potatoes or ground lamb and is India’s great contribution to the world of fast food. Traditional samosas come in all sorts of variations; in the Punjab they’re smaller and more akin to Western potato puffs, while in southern India wrappers are traditionally made from Lentil flour. There’s samosa chaat—where samosas are doused in chickpea curry or yogurts and chutneys to make for a quick, messy meal on the go—and regional variations like Bengali dessert samosas filled with rosewater or Myanmar’s samosas, which substitute wonton wrappers for the thicker shells used in India.

But the samosa is also the product of a thousand years of culinary heritage. Variants of this uniquely Indian food can be found everywhere from Cape Town to Singapore to Tashkent to Tel Aviv. A samosa/samoosa/samsa/sambusek/burek world tour (with recipes) after the jump. 

Food historians have established, however, that the samosa originated not in India, but in Persia. The sanbusaj, originally a Persian term for any stuffed, savory pastry or dumpling, started showing up in Persian, Arab and Turkish literature starting in the 9th century, when poet Ishaq ibn Ibrahim-al-Mausili wrote verse praising sanbusaj.

The first mention of the proper samosa was in Amir Khusrao’s 13th century memoir of Delhi’s royal court, when he mentioned “samosa prepared from meat, ghee, onion and so on.” There was also the legendary explorer Ibn Battuta, who in India, wrote about the sambusak: “Minced meat cooked with almonds, pistachios, onions and spices placed inside a thin envelope of wheat and deep-fried in ghee.”

In neighboring Central Asian countries, the samosa mutated into two forms. The sambosa in Afghanistan is boiled instead of fried, while the samsa of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang in China is a puffy bread stuffed with ground lamb, fried onions and spices. Here in New York, the samsa can be sampled cross-culturally at the Bukharan Jewish Uzbekistan Community Center in Rego Park and the Chinese Muslim Café Kashkar in Brighton Beach.

In Southeast Asia, the samosa evolved into the wonton-wrapped Burmese samosa and in an anglicized form as the Singaporean curry puff: same food, different name. At the same time, the curry puff caught on with Chinese immigrants to Singapore, who bought it back to their homeland. Now filled with the innovation of curried chicken or beef, curry puffs are a regular at Chinatown bakeries here in New York, though most bakers substitute a croissant-like pastry for the original deep-fried shell.

Indian immigrants to Africa brought the samosa over there, too. With an extra “o,” the samoosa is a popular snack food throughout South Africa and former British colonies like Kenya and Uganda.

The original sanbusaj, of course, was a Persian food. Throughout the Middle East and the Balkans, descendants of the sanbusaj still exist. The Turkish borek is a stuffed, phyllo-dough like pastry filled with savory fillings like cheese or potato. Though flat instead of triangular and baked instead of fried, the common sanbusaj ancestry is still shared with the samosa. In Israel, borekas, first cooked by Sephardic Jews, are only second to falafel in the nation’s snack-food consciousness. Albanian bureks are pizza-sized phyllo pies filled with spinach or feta cheese and can be found at a number of pizzerias in the Arthur Avenue neighborhood of the Bronx (incidentally, another stop on Mike Colameco’s Food Adventures). The same boreks are popular in the former Yugoslavia, while a distant cousin of the borek still exists in Greece as the meat pie bourekakia. A bit closer to the original Indian article is the sambusek and the Egyptian sambusak, which is (yup) a deep-fried pastry filled with ground lamb and popular throughout the Arab world.

Meanwhile, the sambusek and borek left relatives of their own in North Africa. Boureks are deep-fried, cigar-shaped, ground-lamb-filled pastries from Algeria, Libya and Morocco that are commonly served at Sephardic Jewish restaurants as “Moroccan cigars,” while Libya has its own bureeks, similar to sambuseks except baked instead of fried. Finally, there’s the Tunisian brik, a deep-fried pastry filled with tuna, grated cheese and harissa sauce.

If you want to make your own samosas at home, you could do worse than our Indian Cooking Class or Mike Colameco‘s guided tour of the best Indian spice stores in the city. In the meantime, however, here are a few recipes from the extended samosa family (and if you’re a recipe collector, don’t miss Mark Bittman’s November Noontime Lecture, The Best Recipes in the World).

Samosas
Courtesy of Wikibooks

· ¼ kg potatoes and green peas combined
· 2 onions
· 2 twigs mint leaves
· 2 green chillis
· 2 twigs of cilantro (Coriander)
· Maida (Wheat flour)
· a little olive oil

1. Steam the potatoes and peas separately.

2. Cut the onions into small slices.

3. Add some olive oil in a fry pan.

4. Add onions and cut green hot chillies and sauté the onions until it turns transparent.

5. Add the vegetables and sauté them while stirring, until they are completely cooked.

6. Add mint leaves and coriander leaves (cilantro).

7. Mix maida (Wheat flour) with water to make a stiff dough, knead it well.

8. Roll into even sized balls and make into round shape using a roller.

9. Cut into 2 semi-circles.

10. Place the curry and fold on three sides to make into a cone shape.

11. Deep fry until it becomes crisp.

Sephardic Borekas de Patata kon Kezo
Courtesy of The Forward

For dough:
· ½ cup sunflower or other light vegetable oil
· ½ cup (1 stick) butter, melted
· ½ cup warm water
· 3 ½ to 4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
· 1 tsp. salt

For filling:
· 1 large Russet potato (about 10 ounces), peeled and quartered
· 2 tbsp. butter
· ¾ cup (about 6 ounces) firmly packed grated Gouda cheese
· ¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for sprinkling
· 1 egg, lightly beaten
· Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
· 1 beaten egg plus 1 tbsp. water for egg wash

1. Make the dough: Place the oil, butter, and water in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat to combine. Mix together 4 cups of flour and the salt in a large bowl and gradually beat into the liquid ingredients. Add enough flour to create a soft, oily dough that holds together and pulls away cleanly from the side of the bowl. Divide the dough in half and form into two discs. Cover each disc with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 45 minutes.

2. Make the filling: Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add the potato and cook until soft. Drain, then place in a medium bowl and mash with a hand masher. Stir in the butter, then let cool. When cool, add the remaining ingredients and mix well.

3. Make the borekas: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two baking sheets or line them with parchment paper. On a lightly floured surface, roll out each of the dough discs to about 18-inch thickness. With a cookie cutter or the edge of a wide glass, cut out rounds 4 inches in diameter. Gently roll each individual round a bit more thinly before filling it. Place about 2 teaspoons of filling in the center of each round. Fold the dough over the filling, making a half-moon shape, and pinch the edges firmly together to seal the dough. (Note: Uncooked borekas can be frozen until ready for use; do not thaw before baking.)

4. Place the borekas on the prepared baking sheets and brush them lightly with the egg wash. Sprinkle with additional grated Parmesan. Bake until golden, about 30 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Makes about 24.

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