Cooling on the rack today: a bunch of wobbly, misshapen versions of samosas, the quintessential Indian street food, which it turns out have a migrant origins story.
My kitchen alchemical attempts today are loosely based on a (contemporary, internet sourced) Punjabi potato samosa recipe, with ajwan seeds in the crust, a fresh Serrano pepper plucked from my garden for heat, onion, garlic (homegrown), ginger, potato, carrot, a bunch of different Indian spices and chopped green beans because peas are not in season here at the moment. I gave up trying to make the traditional triangular pockets because my dough kept splitting, and resorted instead to an easier fill and fold format.
I also chose to bake, not deep fry these morsels. It’s more a personal preference than a health thing: I really don’t like hot oil but apparently for some purists and palate police it’s a sin not to deep fry these culinary offerings. Annapurna forgive me.
In truth baking probably does compromise the overall experience a bit. Some claim that without immersion in hot oil the spice flavors don’t emerge and the pastry doesn’t puff and flake right. Oh well. I did temper mustard seeds in oil for the potato vegetable stuffing.
Though pastry has never been and obviously is still not my strong suit, these lumpy bumpy creations were tasty enough, enjoyed fresh from the oven with apricot date chutney made in June this year, avocado and a cup of masala chai under the now leaf-shedding apricot tree outback. It’s a blustery sun-in sun-out, cloud skudding, tie down everything loose kind of autumn day.
Culinary historians have called samosas a syncretic dish - the result of a fusion of cultures. It seems, like so much, they probably have an origin story in the Middle East, not India where they now claim identity in the popular mind. Used to be, when I studied art history, the Middle East area was referred to as The Cradle of Civilization and my Nat Geo DNA analysis claims that I, along with a whole lot of the modern human race, also have genetic ancestry stories in the region.
The word “samosa” has Persian roots. Apparently the first written mention of samosas as a culinary thing was by the Persian historian Abul-Fazl Beyhaqi, who wrote in the 11th Century.
In his short but very informative 2016 magazine article - The story of India as told by a humble street snack - the BBC’s South Asian correspondent Justin Rowlet wrote: Bite into a samosa and the notion that identity is defined by the boundaries of a nation state should shatter like the deep-fried crust.
Yes. Read that again: …the notion that identity is defined by the boundaries of a nation state should shatter… And the hammer comes down.
Demon nationalism. “Where are you from?”
In a braiding over time of Old World and New World, Punjabi potato filled samosas require the Portuguese to have brought potatoes and chile to the Indian sub continent, and the British to later boost potato consumption in the days of Queen Victoria painting the world map all her own colour.
Today, as I savor my tribute to samosas and the blurred, smudged identity of the immigrant, I think about buying samosas from street vendors in Cape Town, Durban, Nairobi, Mumbai and Delhi, and that October day I stepped off an airplane onto the tarmac in Seattle. 25 years ago to the day today.
I also think about other hand pies I have enjoyed in other places: cheesy empanadas from a kiosk in the transit lounge of Miami airport en route to Montego Bay, and the delicious callaloo pasties which I breakfasted on almost every day while in Jamaica.
And way back in the early eighties, those mushroom pies, so beloved of a certain young surfer friend, from the corner shop opposite the Naran Brothers store in old Makhanda.
Those were the days, my friend.
We thought they’d never end.
They did.
Turned out we all had other waves to catch, other wildernesses to brave. We are a diaspora unreconstructed.
On this day of remembering and forgetting, I shall eat (made from scratch, imperfect) samosas and flip through old photographs, thinking about this imperfect, made from scratch life I seem to inhabit.
After the sundering, everything is forever an approximation, never the thing itself.