[JUMP TO RECIPE]

There’s a shop at the corner of Ryan School Road and Kundanahalli main road in Bengaluru that sells North Indian style samosas with fried chillies and sweet-ish tea begging for a cigarette. When I worked in one of the Bangalore data mines in the 2010s, that shop’s samosas were my substitute for learning to cook. 

Today, I found myself thinking about that samosa after seeing a theory online about how wheat is an American conspiracy to make Indians fat. Firstly, because samosas are very dependent on wheat but also because if Indians decide to shun wheat as foreign import, that could suggest some very interesting alterations to the samosas. I asked myself: what would it look like to make a samosa that was purely Indian, of ingredients and techniques verifiably originating within the Indian subcontinent? And so, I set out to decolonize the samosa.

Before we embark on this very important journey, let’s get on the same page about what a samosa is by taking one of these golden tetrahedrons and pulling it apart to investigate. What do we find? A fried casing of maida (milled wheat flour) and ajwain (caraway) holding a mash of aaloo (potatoes) and matar (green peas) spiced with hari mirchi (green chilli peppers), jeera (cumin), dhania (coriander), saunf (fennel), adrak (ginger), heeng (asafoetida), and garam masala (a mix of warm spices.) From a Eurocentric view of food topology, we can now state that a samosa is a spiced-potato-mash-stuffed fried calzone. In the decolonizing spirit, let us invert that gaze and posit that calzones are cheese-stuffed baked samosas.

Now that we hold the same samosa in our minds, let us return to the task of improving it for the nativist palate. We will first run through the ingredients and exclude the ones ones originating outside the Indian subcontinent (for simplicity, the countries contiguous with modern India, except China)

1. Potatoes and Chillies: originated in the New World and were introduced in the 16th century by the Portuguese after the Columbian Exchange. Not from here. Denied.
2. Peas and Caraway: came to India real early (Indus-era early, i.e. ~5000 BC) but originated somewhere in Anatolia. Go back to Turkey.
3. Maida: wheat came to India from the Levant, also during the Indus era. The process of milling is also ancient, but it’s shockingly hard to find a date on when we started getting the bran out of wheat flour. Probably when Norman Borlaug ensnared Indira Gandhi in his web of international wheat schemes. Basically a Soros conspiracy.
4. Asafoetida: the deserts of Iran and Afghanistan. Afghanistan might count, given our loosey-goosey definition of Indian subcontinent.
5. Cumin: originated in the Middle East. Need I say more?
6. Coriander and fennel: the Mediterranean coastline. Arrivederci, amico. Adio. Güle güle.
7. Ginger and most spices in garam masala: Southeast Asia. The Chola thalassocracy might nudge this over into acceptability eventually but, for now: selamat tinggal!
8. The other spices in garam masala: Black pepper, cardamom and (maybe) cinnamon are all from the Indian subcontinent. Desh ki dharti plus solemn tear.

Now that we’re done with the ingredients. Let’s consider the two key techniques

1. Stuffed pastry-packet: Given that wheat itself isn’t from the Indian subcontinent, this may not be relevant but I found it interesting that the casing technique and the name itself might not be acceptable to a nativist. Sambusas or a sambusak or qutab (no relation, presumably) probably came from the Middle East, as narrated by Amir Khusro (yes relation, same guy) when he described the Delhi Sultanate’s courtly foods.
2. Frying: the concept of frying finds first mention fairly early on in Indian history, with Harappan ruins revealing copper frying pans and the Rigveda mentioning many instances of frying. I am not going to even accidentally imply that those two aren’t Indian, because DDoS attacks are no joke.

The food historian Pushpesh Pant also notes several claims that samosas is actually Indian based on references to a dish called samushak in Sanskrit texts. However, knowing when potatoes came to India, it would be implausible to imagine that the potato-filled samosa is any older than the 16th century. Now, is a samosa with no potatoes in it a samosa at all? The answer is left up to the reader, with apologies to Lalu Prasad Yadav. For bonus comedy, try and guess how many less polite phrases I went through before landing on “implausible.” 

Given everything we have learned about the nativist samosa, we can now reconstruct a recipe with ingredients and techniques authentic to the Indian subcontinent. Here you go, dear reader, the fruits of our labor:

---

Nativist Samosas

[PRINT] [SAVE] [RE-EVALUATE LIFE]

Calories: 0 kcal per serving

Serves: you right

Ingredients

• 1 tsp nativist garam masala (ground up black pepper, cardamom, cinammon)

• 1 pinch of asafoetida

• 4 cups of frying fat (oil, ghee, tallow etc.)

• Salt to taste

Steps

1. Line a plate with a paper napkin
2. Heat 4 cups frying fat in a heavy bottom pan till it reaches 350F/175C
3. Add the nativist garam masala (watch for splatters) and salt to taste
4. Add the asafoetida and immediately go to the next step
5. Work quickly with a spoon to remove the powder onto the napkin
6. You can lick the napkin, or scrape off into a serving dish
7. Bon appetit!