[Sca-cooks] Experimenting with Mystery Keema and the Ni'matnama

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[Warning: this is NOT a formal redaction. This is me using historical
recipes as a starting point but I figured people might be interested.]

Sunday I went shopping, as I often do, and visited the local Indian grocery
to pick up necessary ingredients like fresh curry leaves and naan. I swung
by the frozen meat case out of curiosity, and, jackpot! They had
ground...something. Samosa for supper!! However...it was unlabeled. I have
no idea what it actually is, nor how much I bought, because I ALSO forgot
to weigh it and I threw out the receipt before I realized I'd forgotten to
weigh it. It has to be either lamb or goat, because they source their meat
from a halal butcher, but beyond that, it's a mystery. So I am calling it
the Mystery Keema. For those of you who are curious, or who are Stefan,
"keema" is ground or minced meat.

So anyway and anyhow.

Samosas are an import into Indian cuisine, you'll find them in Middle
Eastern restaurants as sambusa. They go right the way back, at least to the
10th century, because they show up in whichever 10th century cookbook that
is which is in the other room and I'm too lazy to get up and verify the
title.

The Ni'matnama (which is conveniently on my desk here) has a bunch of
recipes for samosas, both sweet and savory. In fact, it starts out with
samosa recipes. The first recipe is, I *think*, for a cheese filling. The
second is for a (probably) lentil and herb filling. The next three are meat
recipes.

#3 Another kind of Ghiyath Shahi's samosas: take well-cooked mince with the
same amount of minced onion and flavor it with dried ginger. Having ground
a quarter of that with half a tulcha of garlic, mix them all together.
Grind three tulchas of saffron in rosewater and mix it with the mince.
Remove the pulp from aubergines and, having mixed it with the mince, stuff
the samosas and fry them in ghee. They can be either of thin dry bread or
of fine flour bread or of uncooked dough. Cook each of the three kinds of
samosas, they are delicious and good.

#4 Another kind of Ghiyath Shahi's samosas: take finely minced deer meat
and flavour ghee with fenugreek and, having mixed the mince with saffron,
put it in the ghee. Roast salt and cumin together. Having added cumin,
cloves, coriander and a quarter of a ratti of musk to the mince, cook it
well. Put half the minced onion and a quarter of the minced dried ginger
into the meat. When it has become well-cooked, put in rosewater. Take it
off and stuff the samosas. Make a hole in the samosa with a stick and fry
it in sweet-smelling ghee. By the same method samosas of any kind of meat
that is desired, can be made.

#5 The method for samosas of tender meat of mountain sheep or of deer:
mince finely and add turmeric, cumin, fenugreek, coriander, cardamon and
cloves, and mix them together. Flavor sweet-smelling ghee with asafoetida.
When the ghee has become well-flavoured, put the mince in it and leave it
so that it becomes well-cooked. Add lime juice and pepper and then put in a
quarter of a sir of dried ginger and one sir of chopped onion and remove
it. Add one ratti of camphor and one ratti of musk. Prepare a few large
samosas and a few small ones the size of one mouthful. Having stuffed them
with the mince, fry them in sweet-smelling ghee and, when they are to be
eaten, sprinkle them with vinegar or lime juice. Serve them and eat them.


Under the heading of "I have this stuff and I need to use it up", I thawed
a package of sambusa wrappers I got at the slightly-less-local Middle
Eastern grocery last year. The plan had been to do samosa at our camping
event last July but it was OHMYGODHOT so frying things in hot oil was not
high on my list of fun ways to spend an afternoon and so I still have six
packages in my freezer. I also pulled out a package of rice paper wrappers,
and made up a batch of gluten-free samosa dough.

There is a method to my madness - our recently minted Baron is allergic to
wheat. I found the recommendation to use rice paper wrappers in my search
for gluten-free samosa dough, so I figured I'd try it and see how it went.
I used this recipe for gf samosa dough:
https://www.coeliac.org.uk/gluten-free-diet-and-lifestyle/recipe-database/1253787/
using
the mix that I have already. It contains xanthan gum so I left that out. I
also left out the ajwain seeds because I recently rearranged my spice
cabinet and I'm not entirely sure which shelf they're on. Onward.

I read most of the samosa recipes in the Ni'matnama and concluded that
clearly my mystery keema needed onion, garlic, ginger, fenugreek, cloves,
cumin, coriander, and cardamom. And ghee. Pulled out an onion and minced
that up. Ground up some fenugreek seeds and cloves, about a half-teaspoon
each, melted up some ghee, and threw in the aforementioned fenugreek and
cloves, and about a teaspoon of ground coriander, 3/4 teaspoon ground
cumin, and probably about 3/4 teaspoon ground cardamom. Cooked them for a
moment or two, then added the onion. Cooked the onion until it was nice and
soft and starting to brown, and threw in a few heaping spoonfuls of
ginger-garlic paste. Cooked that a bit, then added the mystery keema and
cooked it until it was, well, cooked. I let it cool at a slant, so the fat
would drain to one side, and heated up some peanut oil for frying.

I softened 3 rice paper wrappers in hot water and folded them around the
keema (thus making 3 samosa). Then I made about eight using the sambusa
wrappers (which are long and thin--you fold the end over the filling at an
angle so it makes a triangle, then just keep folding over and over until
you get to the end). Fried them all until they were lovely and golden, and
declared that I was done frying things for the day and put the dough in the
fridge. That was yesterday. Today I rolled out the dough that I hadn't
gotten to yesterday and made...16 samosas. The dough recipe does not
actually say how many it makes, but 16 seems to be a good number--the dough
was rolled not quite 1/8" thick, and it seems to have cooked through.

The keema itself, is really really good. The Consort thought the spicing
was delicate yet balanced, and he's not wrong. I could have used more onion
given that the recipes talk about equivalent onion to minced meat. The
sambusa wrappers are nice and crispy, very like phyllo. I will use them
when I play with sambusa recipes from the Arabic corpus. The rice paper
wrappers...are terrible. Very crispy, but the part inside that didn't get
crisped was gummy. Blech. The gluten-free dough, is AMAZINGLY DELICIOUS. I
still have about 2/5 of the keema leftover so my next experiment is going
to be with a recipe for chickpea flour pastry but using urad flour, because
somehow I have three bags of urad flour in my kitchen.

Enjoy!

Margaret