FUNNY or not funny. So many of our favorite snacks and near-national dishes in India we think of as quintessentially Indian. But they are not. They’re just spin-offs of something the Arabs brought or the Moghuls or the British or the Portuguese. My latest discovery is that the triangular savoury stuffed snack we love so much – the samosa – has Persian cuisine roots as in “sambosa” or “sambusak.” In the 13th-14th centuries, traders carried this snack to fill hunger pangs.
So much comes to us from the Middle Eastern countries, old and new, so sometimes it is so pointless saying, this, is Indian. Pure Indian! I mean in the last two days I’ve been savoring samosa here and there downtown Panjim, in search of the perfect samosa. Who doesn’t love a samosa? Batatvada and the samosa must be our favourite snacks going around India and they’ve even made it abroad in the countries of the West.
I recall once in the mid-1970s eating a very insipid British “samosa” at a London underground railway cafeteria, it was filled with boiled potato mash with some herbal mix laced in for bit flavor, a far cry from our now traditional samosa which may be sublime or an utterly spiced up mess oozing oil. A good samosa is really hard to find nowadays.
Some places downtown Panjim they’re fine and I recall how for many years rain or sunshine the Vinod Vadapau guy standing beneath this giant mango tree outside The Living Room pavement space, his mobile cart retailing every evening some of the finest scrumptious samosa, also other things like potato kappam, onion bhajia, call them savoury fritters Indians love to snack on when hungry in between meals and especially in rain-filled weather.
Vinodbhai did very well, a fortune was earned, then he passed on and daughter and family got a shop out at the beginning of 18 June road to continue the popular snack business…but these days when I stop if passing by the little shop outlet, doing brisk business any time of the days — I find they’re out of samosa or they get over real quickly and I cannot make do with onion bhajia or batat kappam or the big chilly fritters which Goans love so much; many crowd around for on the spot enjoyment or pack away. Great fresh green chutney and red garlic powder chutney…of course, samosas are deep fried affairs of the palate.
I’m addicted to samosa too but eat them only when a little crazy nowadays and look for the qualitatively better ones, only in 5-star cafes like at the Marriott resort, where one may find the baby or mini cocktail samosa with caju featuring in the potato mash within! But the service is elegant and on a hungry evening after skipping brunch or lunch one may make a meal of them by the dozen…
ANYWAY this is just to say many of our popular snacks hail from the Middle East and especially the erstwhile Turkish royal kitchens of Sultan Suleiman — think gulab jamun as I must have mentioned here earlier, they originated in Persia (present Iran) and were called “Luqmat al-Qadi,” primarily deep-fried dough balls soaked in rose water syrup and of course the Mughals brought them to India, a once royal sweetmeat which we now consume as a staple dessert length and breadth of the country. Never mind how edible or inedible they may be!

There’s a village in UP called Maigalganj where they sell small gulab jamun but then again there are many variants now including a kala gulab jamun…okay, no more. By the way “gul” means “flower” and “ab” water in Persian, if I remember right! So it’s “roses in honey because at one time there was no refined white sugar. Refined white sugar is a modern-day industrial ingredient to help us die of some cancer or another. Switch to honey (but not the bad honey from bee keepers who feed the bees on sugar on their farms).
Other tidbits: Did you know that our humble “vada-pao” is a Portuguese time relationship, when the Indian spicy mashed potato balls, dipped in besan batter before deep frying…well, someone decided to stuff a hot “batatvada” in a cosy cold loaf of bread called “pao” (baked bread loaves are a gift of Portuguese colonial times) to be relished dipped in some chutney or another. I usually stick to hot batatvada, don’t like bread too much.
What else? Yes, the convoluted sweet “jalebi” is the Persian “zolbiya” and “zulabiya” in Arabic. Do you know that in India there’s a tradition that if a boy is born it is gulab jamun and peda distribution, while if a girl is born it is jalebi distribution! Like it or not familiar “naan” roti is of Persian origin, so is “biriani”, even the Bengali bitter gourd redolent “shukto” has Portuguese influence…think “chicken tikka masala” which is said to be created by a Bangladeshi chef in Scotland in 1970 and this non-veg delight has became a British favorite. Hey, London is said to have 3,600 Indian restaurants, more than combined Delhi and Mumbai!
I’ll leave you all to think about all this. If we become a Hindu nation are we going to one by one boycott the foodie favorites we’ve become so addicted to with appreciation and love? In any case India can never be only a Hindu nation, it belongs to all who have lived here for generations and divisions are odious and can only invite more and more trouble. Don’t take these political sides, my dears, for no achievements worth talking about.