Around The World In A Bite-Sized Snack
Text by Fehmida Zakeer
Spiced, minced mutton is usually the filling of choice for kozhiadas. Photo by Fehmida Zakeer
For the Moplah (or Mappila) community of northern Kerala, kozhiada holds a special significance. A crescent-shaped, fried turnover with a meat filling, this traditional pastry is a well-loved snack among our community of Malabari Muslims. During the month of Ramadan, one of the most frequently made snacks in my home would be kozhiada or any of its variations.
When we were young, my grandmother would set up a routine starting on the first day of Ramadan. My sisters and I would return from school around three in the afternoon to see ummama organising a makeshift workstation on the kitchen table with a rolling pin, a small bowl of flour, a container of dough and a bamboo winnow lined with a piece of clean cloth. A medium-sized kadai placed in the middle of the table held the mutton mince garnished with coriander leaves and garam masala powder that she would have prepared earlier in the day.
Strangely, even though the term ‘kozhi’ translates to chicken in Malayalam, kozhiada is traditionally made with mutton mince in Moplah cuisine. To make the filling, ummama would have fried diced onions and green chillies along with crushed garlic and ginger until golden brown. A pinch of turmeric powder and a bit of chilli powder would go in next, followed by pre-cooked mutton mince. She would then fry everything on a low flame until the mixture was moist but not soggy.
“Freshen up and come quickly,” she would say, and we would turn up to take our place at the table. My sisters and I would have already divided among ourselves the tasks that each of us would take up in turns during this month. As she divided the dough into balls and rolled out each one into a large, thin circle on the tabletop, my normally reticent grandmother would open up, sharing her childhood memories of growing up in the small town of Tellicherry on the Malabar coast. Ummama’s interest in cooking was sparked by her mother, who loved to experiment with recipes and create her own versions of familiar dishes. Ummama too had picked up this habit, and we often saw her poring over recipe books and rendering her own spin to traditional foods.
Deviating from tradition, she would sometimes add shredded cabbage, finely cut beans, carrots, cauliflower, or whatever else was available at hand, into kozhiadas. It was her way of sneaking vegetables into the snack. Besides, it also bulked up the filling, allowing the pastry to keep its rounded shape even after it cooled. The sweetness of the caramelised onions was balanced by the slight heat of the garam masala, while the crispness of the vegetables contrasted the soft texture of the mutton mince.
When she was satisfied with the thinness of the rolled out dough, ummama would use a steel bowl or the lid of a small steel container to cut out circles — one big circle of rolled out dough yielded about five or six smaller circles. Our job was to fill the circular cut-outs with a teaspoon of the filling and then crimp the edges.
Sometimes, in a hurry to complete the task, we would do a rushed job of the crimping, resulting in rather large curls on the edges. Ummama would remark then: “The curls should be as small as baby’s teeth, not like the large ones of an adult.” We lined the pastries in the winnow and, when the entire batch was completed, covered it up with another piece of cloth. The pastries would sit there drying out a bit, which helped in making them crisp when we fried them closer to iftar. Of all the steps involved in making kozhiada, frying was definitely the easiest part. Once done, the crisp, golden-brown pastry offered a fine dalliance of textures and tastes.
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It is probable that Malaysian epok-epoks and kozhiadas were both influenced by Portuguese and Iberian empanadas
What does the kozhiada have in common with another crescent-shaped pastry that is beloved in several parts of the world?
I set out to find out more about this connection after chancing upon empanadas at a food festival in Chennai. I was attracted by their shape and the contents of their filling, which seemed quite similar to the kozhiada. The crust was thicker and the meat filling was denser with a touch of tomato, but the snack evoked the form and taste of the familiar snack of my childhood.
In the book International Cuisine, published by the International Culinary Schools at The Art Institute, a Portuguese empada (a different name for the empanada) is described as a stuffed pastry found in Spain, Portugal, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Philippines. The name empanada is supposedly derived from the Spanish word ‘empanar’, which means ‘to coat, wrap or cover’. Empanadas are baked or fried and usually savoury, stuffed with meat, cheese, vegetables and other ingredients.
During India’s COVID lockdown last year, I saw a picture of curry puffs on the Instagram feed of the Malaysian doctor and cookbook author, Dr Jehanne Ali. Seeing their resemblance to empanadas, I reached out to her to find out if there was a likely connection between curry puffs and empanadas. “The curry puffs or ‘epok-epok’, as it is known traditionally in Malaysia, is most likely like empanadas,” she replied. “Given that Malaysia was a big trading hub in the 1500s and was colonised by the Dutch and Portuguese, a European influence can be seen in the food habits.” According to Dr Ali, curry puffs in Malaysia are mostly savoury and the filling is usually potatoes mixed with meat, chicken or occasionally sardines.
I now wondered if kozhiadas also had a Portuguese connection, because we know that the Portuguese first arrived on the shores of North Kerala in 1498. In an email interview, Janet Boileau, a food historian whose expertise lies in Portuguese-Asian cuisine and culture, said that the empanada likely evolved from the Iberian empada, and was carried to Asian shores through colonisation. According to Boileau, the Iberian empada was historically a single, large baked pie, commonly filled with fish. But there are also Iberian empanadas, which are smaller, hand-held pies that are either baked or fried.
“While the Spanish took [these] across to South America where empanadas are made with various different types of pastry, including yeasted bread dough, the Portuguese carried it towards Asia,” she said. In her paper, The culinary history of the Portuguese Eurasians: The Origins of Luso-Asian Cuisine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Boileau writes, “Epok-epok, and the similar turnovers called pastel in Indonesia, empadas in Macao, empadinhas in Goa are probable descendants of the Iberian empada, originally a pie encased in bread.”
The first empanadas were likely to have been made in the Iberian Peninsula, specifically Portugal and Galicia (the northwestern-most region of Spain), during the Medieval period and at the time of the Moorish invasion. International Cuisine states that the Galician empanada was originally prepared with cod or chicken. It also says that the empanada may have been added to the cuisine of the region due to the influence of the Moors — Muslims of Arab and North African descent — who occupied Spain for 800 years. During their stay in the Iberian region, the Moors introduced new foods like rice, almonds, saffron and other spices, along with cooking practises such as frying and using vinegar as a preservative.
Versions of the empanada can be seen all over the world. In some countries, the dough is made with corn flour, while in others, mashed potato is added to the dough along with the flour of choice. Food blogger and photographer Aparna Balasubramanian says that Goa also has a form of empanada called Rissóis de Camarão, which is halfway between a turnover and a croquette. “These are Portuguese-influenced turnovers that are dipped in an egg coating, breaded and deep fried,” she said. “They are typically filled with a creamy mixture of prawns or shrimp in a folded over pastry wrapping.”
Could kozhiadas also have been influenced by samosas or Middle Eastern sambusaks?
A cookbook published in Catalan in 1520 lists the recipe for empanadas with a filling of seafood. Since this mention of empanadas in Iberia coincides with the presence of Moors in the region, another question that arises is whether the empanada could have been derived from samosas or ‘sambusak’ as they are called in the Middle East.
According to Sadaf Hussain, consultant chef and author of Daastan-e-Dastarkhan: Stories and Recipes from Muslim Kitchens, samosas trace their origins to Egypt and Libya. This popular snack was initially named samsa, after the pyramids in Central Asia. The samsa was first mentioned by Abul-Fazl Bayhaqi, a 10th Century Persian historian who described it as square-shaped pockets filled with minced meat, spices and onion, cooked in a tandoori clay oven. Historical accounts also refer to it as sanbusak, sanbusaq, or even sanbusaj, all derived from the Persian word, sanbosag. “This was a popular street snack amongst the merchants and silk-road travellers who carried these small pockets with them as travel food,” said Hussain.
Interestingly, there is a record of the presence of samosas in the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent in the 14th Century, even before the Portuguese had set foot in India. The snack likely travelled through the mountains with the Persians looking to expand their kingdoms. In the early 1300s, poet and scholar Amir Khusro wrote about the samosa relished by the nobles in the Delhi Sultanate, while the intrepid traveller, Ibn Batuta, recorded the presence of a delicious snack called sambusak, made of minced meat and dry fruits, at the dinner table hosted by the 14th Century Mughal emperor, Muhammed Bin Tughlaq. Historian and writer Tarana Hussain Khan says that there is mention of meat-filled pastries served along with biryani in the Delhi Sultanate. “The snack was served before the rice, [for] crunch, before relishing the softness of the biryani,” she told me when I spoke with her over the phone.
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Kozhiada is called erach-pathil when it is triangular and crimped at the edges. It is made of the same dough and has the same filling. Photo by Fehmida Zakeer
The same dough and mince used for kozhiada is also repurposed to make snacks that are similar, yet look different in shape and size. The crescent-shaped kozhiada becomes petti-pathiri when the pastry is moulded to a square or rectangular shape, while it is called erachi-pathil when it is triangular and crimped at the edges. In Moplah chef and author Faiza Moosa’s cookbook, Classic Malabar Recipes, she introduces the recipe for petti pathiri with the following explanation: “Fried squares stuffed with shredded meat: Petti pathiri gets its name from petti [or] box. A popular Ramadan snack, it also doubles up as a starter in a festive menu.”
A recent practice is to do away with the crimping and shape the pastry into a flat triangle like, well, the samosa. The availability of readymade samosa sheets and the ease of wrapping the pastries and freezing them for later use has allowed the samosa to usurp the place long held by the kozhiada.
Sometimes, my grandmother would decide to favour a vegetarian filling and make the parippu ada instead of the kozhiada. In this iteration, the pastry transforms from a non-vegetarian snack to a vegetarian one just by substituting the meat with a mash of lentils. The vegetarian parippu ada is crescent-shaped and has a filling of boiled and mashed chana dal added to a fried mixture of onion, ginger and green chillies, sprinkled with cumin powder and finely chopped cilantro.
The sweet version of the parippu ada, also crescent-shaped, has a filling of lightly fried, grated coconut, cinnamon, cardamom, raisins and cashews. This sweet ada resembles the sweetmeats that are popularly made during festivals, and enjoy a pan-Indian presence. They go by different names such as gujiya, karanji, nevri, karjikayi and pedakiya, and have a variety of fillings, from semolina, nuts and jaggery to coconut and khoya (or reduced milk), depending on regional preferences.
Although they look similar, food historians think gujiyas and empanadas have little in common except their shape
So does this mean that emapanada could, in fact, be the ancestor to the ever-popular gujiya and its cousins?
Food writer and author Marryam H Reshii thinks the resemblance is only skin deep. “Empanadas and gujiyas only resemble each other because of the shape, and the shape is completely incidental,” she told me. “If you have a rolling pin and you make a chapati-shaped dough, when you fill it and fold it over, the default shape will be a half moon.”
Food historian and writer Lizzie Collingham shared a similar view when I spoke with her over a video call. “A pasty stuffed with filling may be invented independently anywhere in the world, it need not necessarily have been brought by someone. But she adds that the crescent shape of curry puffs and kozhiadas could also point to a different ancestry. Citing the long European Jewish tradition of making foods in the crescent shape, she said: “There has been a Jewish presence in Kerala from ancient times and there was also an influx of Jewish families from Spain and Portugal to Kerala around 1492 and thereafter.”
However, even when she suggests the possibility that the Jewish Portuguese — rather than sailors and soldiers — could have had a role in bringing the pastry to Kerala, she adds the caveat that this is purely speculative. “Unless there is documentation, a recipe in a cookbook or a record by someone mentioning the Portuguese making this snack in Kerala, there is no good evidence, and we can only make a guess,” she said.
According to Collingham, given that Kerala has welcomed waves of traders, settlers and colonisers, including the Arabs, Portuguese, Dutch, Syrians, French and British, it is likely that the cuisine of the state was influenced more by the people who arrived through the sea route than by flavours that percolated down from the northern parts of the country.
Boileau points out that in the trading ports around the world, there were traditionally enclaves for each different cultural group, such as Chinatowns, Arab towns etc. But the Portuguese actively encouraged intermarriage and integration with local communities. As a result, cultural exchange was enhanced and culinary hybrids were a natural outcome. It is also possible that such culinary hybridisation may have altered the shape of the samsa, resulting in the crescent-shaped kozhiada.
Even though we do not have any conclusive proof of its ancestry, kozhiada seems to have links not only to ancient times but also to diverse communities around the world. Whether you call it a curry puff, an empanada, a pastel or a samosa, the snack offers a bite of familiarity wherever you come across it.
As I prepare the filling and roll the dough to make the snack for iftar, I decide to make the kozhiada rather than the triangle-shaped samosa because I have now realised that the curled edges definitely add to the flavour of the snack. As I go through a second Ramadan away from my family, separated by a global pandemic, the crescent-shaped kozhiada offers me a chance to evoke the atmosphere of home.
