The samosa is one of the most eaten street foods on the planet. I just found a 500 year old recipe for it written in Persian in a Mughal manuscript that is currently sitting in the British Museum. I'm making and rating it next week. The manuscript is called the Ni'matnama, sometimes translated as the Book of Delights, and it was written between 1501 and 1510 for the Sultan of Mandu, a medieval sultanate in central India. It is not just a cookbook. It is an illustrated record of royal pleasures, covering recipes for sherbet, betel preparations, perfumes, and food across dozens of dishes. After the fall of Mandu to the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1562 the manuscript passed to the Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur, then into the hands of Tipu Sultan of Mysore, and finally after the British stormed Srirangapatnam in 1799 it was taken to England, where it now sits in the collections of the British Museum, translated into English by scholar Nora Titley. The samosa recipe inside it reads as follows. "Mix together well-cooked mince with the same amount of minced onion and chopped dried ginger, a quarter of those, and half a measure of ground garlic, and having ground three measures of saffron in rosewater, mix it with the mince together with aubergine pulp. Stuff the samosas and fry them in ghee." The manuscript then adds, with what feels like genuine enthusiasm across five centuries, that whether made from thin coarse flour bread or from fine flour bread or from uncooked dough, any of the three can be used for cooking samosas, and they are delicious. A 500-year-old recipe with a 500-year-old review attached. The filling is not what you would expect from a modern samosa. Saffron ground in rosewater, aubergine pulp, mince, and garlic, fried in ghee. It is richer, more perfumed, and more obviously courtly than the street food version the world knows today. I am recreating it next week, and I cannot wait to show you what a royal Mughal samosa actually tasted like