Let's stuff these samosas!

I probably don't need to tell you what a samosa is. They're so famous that even M&S sell them. But what you probably don't know is how far young Indu would sink in her seat when Momma Kumar would say "should we make samosas on the weekend?". 
Let's make three things clear before I start:

 1) When Mum asked IF we should make samosas over the weekend it was not a suggestion. She was just giving me a heads up.
2) My place in the samosa factory line was a given. and I was not happy about it.
3) The samosas would take over the entire weekend. Mum would remind me not to make plans for the weekend. then we would make them. Then we would spend most of the weekend eating them.

 To begin with we'd argue which samosas to make, minced lamb or potato. Even though we both knew that we'd end up making both. We had already got our aprons on so we may as well do it properly.

I can hear you asking "my god! why don't you just buy them from the shop?!" and it is a fair point. The shop bought potato ones are not so bad -if you know where to go. But I will tell you what my mother told me all the time growing up: You never know what they put inside the meat ones. Given the massive horse meat scandal my mothers words are oddly prophetic!
 

Store bought vegetable samosas. Perfect to eat in the car ride from uni!

Chicken Samosa from my friend's henna party. Definitely not my favourite kind of Samosa.

That is the reason we made samosas at home. Though I have a sneaky feeling that there were other things going on in our samosa weekends. After the initial reluctance I quite enjoyed making samosas with my mum (granted she did most of it), but I remember her laughing, talking to me about making samosas with her mother.

My mum is one of four sisters and she tells this one anecdote about making the samosas for the wedding reception of her eldest sister. I remember my mothers doughy hands sealing the samosas while she told me how they made HUNDREDS of samosas for my aunts wedding. And how they were tired and how her mother ran the kitchen and everything went off without a hitch. and she took the most pride in telling me how wonderful it was to watch everyone eat the samosas they made at home.

The memory of making samosas with my is one of my favourite childhood memories. Looking back, my father and brother would conveniently disappear when we made then and reappear when they heard them sizzling in the oil. Cheeky. Nevertheless, it felt like a good days work when we counted up all the samosas we made, placed them carefully in the freezer.  We put aside the ones we would have for lunch that day.

Samosas are great! You can enjoy them anywhere...
Piping hot samosas from a roadside cafe, passed around the family, going from New Delhi to Punjab. Or having a sneaky one in the car before you take them home, carefully balancing the chutney on the armrest.  And meandering through the shopping district in Punjab, samosa in hand,  taking quick hot bites because you've seen a saree that needs closer inspection...
But my favourite samosa memory is one that is repeated often. Samosas are delivered to the table at my aunts house. Everybody smiles and politely takes one samosa. you break open your samosa and either rejoice at having picked a lamb samosa (they're always so much better) or you quickly gobble up the potato one so you have another go at getting a lamb one. Like the Karela, homemade samosas are prestigious. Someone is sharing their time, effort and love with you.

please excuse the dopey expression!

How to spend Easter weekend making Samosas:
First, tell your parents you won't be coming home for the holidays. They will try to ply you with promises of lamb curry, shopping trips and your weight in Easter eggs.

Second, make samosas Saturday night, video call everybody so they can see you are making them from scratch (play it cool) and then fry them on Sunday. You are too tired to eat on Saturday night.

Finally, make Aloo Tikki (potato cakes) from the leftover filling. coax/guilt/threaten your flatmate to make chickpeas to go along with the samosas and then FEAST.


The ultimate test for me was to make my very own samosas from scratch. It is not a task for the faint hearted and you can't give up half way. So spurred on by the instructions from my mother and holding my trusty potato peeler I began.

Filling

I'll talk you through the process with the photographs I took. I took visual evidence because I don't think anyone would believe me otherwise. 

So first I made the filling. My mother told me what went in the filling but otherwise everything else was done from childhood memory. 

Boil some potatoes until soft

 

while the potatoes are boiling. You can get started on spicy part. Fry some onions until golden brown and add salt, chillies,crushed garlic and ginger. Add mustard seeds too. You can put peas in too but I hate them.

Mash the potatoes and add the onion ensemble. mix well.

Pastry

Everybody I told was taken aback when I told them I made the pastry too. The conversation when something like this:

I made samosas.

from scratch?

yep.

well done. you bought the pastry though right?

um, no. Made that too.

what?! wow...

If truth be told, I didn't even know you COULD buy the pastry for samosas! (If I had known that I would have bought it instead!)

No store bought pastry, no nonsense.
 

I drizzled a bit of oil into plain flour and kneaded it, adding warm water as I went. the onion in my dough is a trespasser.

 

By this point you will be kneading (get it?) a break.

when it is smooth leave it to sit for 15mins

Put a flat pan on the stove and wait for it to heat as you roll out the dough as if you were making a chapatti. Long, thin and round is the aim. You place them on the pan and wait for them to change colour slightly. do not cook them!

Cut the pastry in half. Right down the middle, as equally as you can. I remember my mum letting me cut the first pastry, it was always wonky. Every time.

These will the the triangles that you fill. I made 18 samosas. Slightly more than I wanted too but when your flatmates threaten to hide your Nutella you don't mind making 10 extra samosas.

Let's stuff those samosas!

Right. So here we are, the moment where this all ends. At this point I was very tired, my dishevelled hair is white with flour and my fingers are overworked by the kneading and the rolling. I clear the work top and pile the dishes high in the sink. I roll up my sleeves, take a histrionic deep breath, roll back my shoulders and with renewed energy say 

"All right. Come on. Let's stuff these samosas." 

And so it began...I emerged from a puff of flour with a small amount of plain flour in a bowl to which I added warm water to make it runny. This is the glue that will seal the samosas.

 Then I got a small spoon, made and sealed the pastry in a cone shape. Then I carefully filled the samosa being careful not to tear the pastry.

Unfortunately after the first stuffing we had a casualty. This pioneering first samosa-to-be-stuffed plummeted 1m to his death.

His death was not in vain.

The next day I took the leftover filling mixed it with some gram flour and made Aloo Tikki to have with the Samosas for dinner. My flatmate, as predicted, made chickpeas to go with them. 

Chana. or chick pea curry.

Aloo Tikki ready to be fried

Samosas are deep fried and Aloo Tikki is shallow fried

Scrumdiddlyumtious!

Finally, dinner time.

Final thoughts

Making samosa was definitely satisfying. There is an unfamiliar fuzzy satisfaction that builds in your chest whenever anyone says  well done or delicious! But the real test will be when I take them home tomorrow for my parents to try. If they like them I'll have to whip up a batch all the time and if they don't I can reclaim my seat as a passive member of team Kumar. And so we wait.

Sweet Memories

Some of my earliest childhood memories are to do with Indian sweets. My eyes would widen as I peeked into the clear cellophane of the box... slowly peeling off the sellotaped sides...the creaking of the box, and then a inhaling the heady sweetness of the Gulab Jamuns. 

I remember my mother sending me to the sweet shop in the early morning on Diwali, Raksha Bandan and other festivals to buy boxes of sweets for my family. I also remember queueing up for almost half an hour because year after year I would be late to the shop. I'd edge closer to the counter, my eyes on the Patisa, Ghajar ka Halwa or Rasmomali and clutching the paper that my mother sent me with. (If I got it wrong and brought home undesirable sweets they would lay untouched and unloved on a plate for the rest of the evening.) 

Motichoor Laddu are always a hit

On Friday evening I attended the wedding reception of my very good friend. The food was great and everybody on our table really enjoyed the Papadi Chaat, the fish Pakoras and the chicken Biryani. But when it came to dessert there was a few frowns and many murmured "why don't you try this?" coming from the non-Asian members of the table. What is it about Indian sweet dishes that make them unpopular? Could it be the syrup they soak in? the excessive sweetness of one portion? or the unnatural colours of the sweets?

Whatever it is has me baffled. Even now I can't help gazing into the Mithai shop when I walk home, or stopping outside the Jalebi vendor as he squeezes out the squiggly shapes into the hot oil.

Jalebi Glasses

I remember occasions where my mum and I would make Gulab Jamun at home. Oddly, it was near the time we'd make homemade Samosas too (that used to be a tiring week). I can't remember how to make them but I can recall making the balls that my mum would fry and sprinkling dessicated coconut over the top of rows of the brown spheres. They tasted so much better than the store bought ones because you get to pick the juiciest ones, the coconuttiest ones and gobble them up.You might find a squishy lump in a few of the homemade ones too. Mum would pack some fresh Gulab Jamun in Tupperware and send some to my Aunt who lived nearby.

So for me, Indian sweets are a a sign of happiness, celebration and prosperity. Therefore, whenever they are in the house something good has happened. Someone has had a healthy baby, an engagement, wedding invitation, festival or excellent exam results.(Mother, if you're reading this I'm hoping for homemade Gulab Jamun when I graduate.)

The colourful delights of my local Mithai shop

Indian sweet dishes are not contained in just the sweet snack arena either. They come in the form of drinks like Falooda (Vermicelli, rose syrup and jelly) and sweet lassi ( Yoghurt drink). And heavier desserts such as Kheer ( rice pudding), Kulfi (Ice cream) and Jarda ( orange rice).

What really brought me to the topic of sweet dishes is Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. It my one of my favourite books despite being a difficult read. What I enjoyed most about Rushdie's novel was how its detail on memory and food. Other texts such as Nigel Slater's Toast and Alice B Toklas' cookbook examine memory through food but Rushdie does it in the realm of Magical Realism.  When the novels protagonist Saleem Sinai writes down the account of his extraordinary life, from birth until this 31st birthday he focuses on the unreliability of memory. My own memory is laughable and like that of a goldfish but taste and smell are often great triggers of memory. Taking you back to your Mother's freshly fried Gulab Jamun or smell of the Barfi sizzling in the microwave.

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. My copy was published by Virago in 1995.

Smell is one of the central themes in the novel. The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is blessed with a large nose. 

On Aadam Aziz, the nose assumed a patriarchal aspect. On my mother it looked noble and a little long-suffering; on my aunt Emerald, snobbish; on my aunt Alia, intellectual; on my uncle Hanif it was the organ of an unsuccessful genius; my uncle Mustapha ,made it a second-rater's sniffer; the brass monkey escaped it completely; but on me- on me, it was something else again. But I mustn't reveal all my secrets at once.(14)

Rushdie links the nose to the whole family adding continuity to the storyline; it adds a linear aspect to a convoluted story. The reader can trace the family tree through the family nose. It is Saleem's nose which is one of his identifying aspects even though he is not the biological grandson of Aadam Aziz. The novel has recently been adapted to film and I include an interview with Satya Bhabha who plays Saleem.  Skip to 1:35 for Satya's explanation of the famous nose.

Saleem Sinai is a cook and a writer. His memory is inextricably linked with food, he explains to Padma his fiancee that

"Things- even people- have a way of leaking into each other...like flavours when you cook" (38)

The role of the cook and the writer are inextricably linked in Saleem and he is aware of this. He consciously considers himself as preserving his memories like pickles:

"And my chutneys and Kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings- by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving.Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of clocks.(38)  

For me Midnight's Children is a novel of education. The reader has watched Saleem grow from an innocent boy into a crumbling man. His relation to food is like his relation to writing: it nourishes, preserves and it has an array of ingredients. In the last chapter of  Midnight's Children  Rushdie exemplifies this when Saleem tastes a chutney that transports him back to his childhood.

"One of the blind waitresses brought us a congratulatory, reviving meal. On the thali of victory: samosas, pakoras, rice, dal, puris; and green chutney. Yes, a little aluminium bowl of chutney, green, my God, green as grasshoppers...and before long a puri was in my hand; and chutney was on the puri; and then I had tasted it, and almost imitated the fainting act of Picture Singh, because it carried me back to a day when I emerged nine-fingered from a hospital and went into exile at the home of Hanif Aziz, and was given the best chutney in the world...the taste of the chutney was more than an echo of that long ago taste- it was the taste itself, the very same, with the power of bringing back the past as if it had never been away..." (456)

In Rushdie's lingering style, he describes how the memory is stimulated through the senses. I have previously had this experience with a semolina Halva called Karah. Karah is a delicious, sweet buttery dish whose butter seeps between your fingers when it is given to you at the temple and is rare eaten in the Kumar household. (In fact, I only remember eating it in the house once. It is packed full of calories.) 

Part of the reason why I love Karah is that it only tastes good at the temple. It is hot, soft and it melts in your mouth better that the cheesiest Wotsit. Maybe it tastes so good because it has been touched by the hand of God? Or maybe it tastes so good because the volunteers at the temple go heavy on the butter and sugar. Either way, whenever it finds its way in my hands I am transported back to a simpler time.

Karah is ridiculously easy to make (which is why my mother recommended it to me) and takes under 10minutes. It requires Semolina, sugar, butter and cashews/almonds if you like nuts. All you do it heat some butter, stir in some semolina, and nuts and then tip some sugar in the pan too. SIMPLE.

I tried to do a healthy version of Karah and skimped on the butter and sugar. Instead of being a golden brown mushy rush back to my childhood, it was health conscious failure. There was no trickling butter, no flashbacks and LOTS leftover.

Me and my brother, Sanj. "One for you, two for me"