#malwa sultanate

[historybizarre]

Curry Before Columbus

Well before there was heat, there was hing.

So what was curry like before Columbus? Well, curry didn’t exist.In these cases, I find it useful to consult my Hobson-Jobson, the nineteenth-century dictionary of Anglo-Indian loan words. According to that source, curry comes from the Portuguese word karil (caril) via the Tamil word kari (sauce, relish for rice). In the sixteenth century, this was transliterated into English as caril, but by the 1680s entered English as carrees, perhaps from caris, an Anglicized plural form of the Portuguese.3

....

Before spicy came spice: the history of curry before Columbus is a history of spice. And so I wonder: what spices were used? In what quantities?

The best spice to help answer these questions might be asafetida (also spelled asafoetida). Known in Hindi as hīng, it’s the dried resin taken from the root of the Ferula herb, and is used throughout Indian cuisine in nearly all Indian regions. When fried in oil, it adds a lovely umami flavor to any dish, one reminiscent of garlic or onions.

[indizombie]

The first mention of samosa can be found around the 10th or 11th century in the Middle East, in historian Abolfazl Beyhaqi's work Tarikh-e Beyhaghi, where it is referred to as sambosa. In its original form, as made in the kitchens of the Ghaznavid empire (the Turkic dynasty who ruled parts of northern India first under Mahmud Ghazni), samosas were pasties filled with meat and dried fruit and then deep fried. We don't know when exactly it assumed its current form, filled with simply minced meat or potatoes and peas. But we do know that when Akbar annexed the Malwa Sultanate in 1562 CE, the Ni'mmatnama (a medieval Persian cookbook) was procured by the Mughals, and subsequently by the sultanate's kitchens too.

Sonal Ved, author