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Samosas vs Empanadas in London
Culinary migration that is reshaping multicultural London
At one end of a building in Porvorim, Goa, is a branch of Café Central, a Panjim institution famous for delicious mushroom samosas. At the other end is Mona’s Coffee Shop which sells Peruvian snacks, like rich alfajores cookies and half-moon-shaped mini-pies called empanadas. This makes it one place in Goa where you can sample a culinary confrontation taking place in London.
Rod Liddle in The Spectator recently noted that empanadas seemed to be everywhere in London, “so it’s goodbye samosas, because there’s only room for one savoury triangularish pastry on the counter”. Liddle has built a career by being performatively rude to anyone he sees as an authority figure, so he naturally blames this change on “cultural shifts, accidents, busybodies and lobbyists”.
But I think there might be more to this trend. It could show how migration from Latin America to the UK is picking up. Nearly every Latin American country makes empanadas, and it makes sense for new immigrants to sell them, to break into London’s booming food scene. Snacks that are handheld and easy to take away are also easier to sell, and it helps if they resemble something familiar.
This is also how samosas first established themselves, replacing Cornish pasties, another triangular savoury snack. Adrian Mole, the hapless hero of Sue Townsend’s books, was given what he thought was a Cornish pasty by his new Indian neighbours at a celebration for Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s marriage in 1981. “It was not a Cornish pasty,” he writes, his mouth still burning with spices.
Shrabani Basu writes in Curry in the Crown, her history of Indian food in the London, that around this time, a bored housewife named Perween Warsi, originally from Muzaffarpur, “made half a dozen samosas and took them to her local takeaway to sell”. They did so well that Warsi started making desi snacks on a larger scale.
Supermarkets showed interest and she started making samosas on an industrial scale — and this, I think, is where the problem started. There are now robots that fill and fold 600 samosas an hour, and the results can be OK but not like hand-made, small batch samosas. (Warsi’s company declared bankruptcy in 2015…
