The Hirshon Tajikistan Lamb Samsa Varaki – Самса Вараки

Citizens! Few things invigorate the soul of the Tsar of Tzaddikim – YOUR TFD! – more than sharing rare recipes that will educate your palate as it also adds tonalities to your culinary palette as well. This dish is a personal favorite, from the fabled Silk Road country of Tajikistan, for their acclaimed meat pie known as samsa varaki – a main course that will assuredly take your own soul to this fabled desert land far in the mountainous East of the former USSR!

Before we arrive at My superlative recipe for samsa varaki, let us first discuss more about the little-known country of Tajikistan!

Tajikistan, officially the Republic of Tajikistan (Ҷумҳурии Тоҷикистон), is a landlocked country in Central Asia. Dushanbe is the capital and most populous city. Tajikistan is bordered by Afghanistan to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and China to the east. It is separated from Pakistan by Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor. It has a population of over 10.7 million people.

The territory was previously home to cultures of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, including the city of Sarazm, and was later home to kingdoms ruled by people of various faiths and cultures including the Oxus civilization, Andronovo culture, Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Islam.

The area has been ruled by empires and dynasties including the Achaemenid Empire, Sasanian Empire, Hephthalite Empire, Samanid Empire, and Mongol Empire. After being ruled by the Timurid Empire and Khanate of Bukhara, the Timurid Renaissance flourished. The region was later conquered by the Russian Empire, before becoming part of the Soviet Union.

Within the Soviet Union, the country’s borders were drawn when it was part of Uzbekistan as an autonomous republic before becoming a constituent republic of the Soviet Union on 5 December 1929. On 9 September 1991, Tajikistan declared itself an independent sovereign nation as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. A civil war was fought after independence, lasting from May 1992 to June 1997.

The term “Tajik” itself ultimately derives from the Middle Persian Tāzīk, the Turkic rendition of the Arabic ethnonym Ṭayyi’, denoting a Qahtanite Arab tribe who emigrated to the Transoxiana region of Central Asia in the 7th century AD. Tajikistan appeared as Tadjikistan or Tadzhikistan in English prior to 1991. This is due to a transliteration from the Russian: “Таджикистан”.

In Russian, there is no single letter “j” to represent the phoneme /d͡ʒ/, and therefore дж, or dzh, is used. Tadzhikistan is the alternate spelling and is used in English literature derived from Russian sources.

While the Library of Congress’s 1997 Country Study of Tajikistan found it difficult to definitively state the origins of the word “Tajik” because the term is “embroiled in twentieth-century political disputes about whether Turkic or Iranic peoples were the original inhabitants of Central Asia,” scholars concluded that contemporary Tajiks are the descendants of the Eastern Iranic inhabitants of Central Asia, in particular, the Sogdians and the Bactrians and possibly other groups.

In later works, Frye expands on the complexity of the historical origins of the Tajiks. In a 1996 publication, Frye explains that “factors must be taken into account in explaining the evolution of the peoples whose remnants are the Tajiks in Central Asia” and that “the peoples of Central Asia, whether Iranic or Turkic speaking, have one culture, one religion, one set of social values and traditions with only language separating them.”

Regarding Tajiks, the Encyclopædia Britannica states:

The Tajiks are the direct descendants of the Iranic peoples whose continuous presence in Central Asia and northern Afghanistan is attested from the middle of the first millennium BC. The ancestors of the Tajiks constituted the core of the ancient population of Khwārezm (Khorezm) and Bactria, which formed part of Transoxania (Sogdiana). Over the course of time, the eastern Iranic dialect that was used by the ancient Tajiks eventually gave way to Tajiki.

Tajikistan encompasses the smallest amount of land among the five Central Asian states, but in terms of elevation it surpasses them all, enclosing more and higher mountains than any other country in the region. Tajikistan was a constituent (union) republic of the Soviet Union from 1929 until its independence in 1991. The capital is Dushanbe.

Several ethnic ties and outside influences complicate Tajikistan’s national identity to a greater extent than in other Central Asian republics. The Tajik people share close kinship and their language with a much larger population of the same nationality living in northeastern Afghanistan, whose population also includes a large proportion speaking Dari, a dialect of Persian intelligible to Tajiks.

Despite sectarian differences (most Tajiks are Sunni Muslims, while Iranians are predominantly Shiʿis), Tajiks also have strong ties to the culture and people of Iran; the Tajik and Persian languages are closely related and mutually intelligible. The Tajiks’ centuries-old economic symbiosis with oasis-dwelling Uzbeks also somewhat confuses the expression of a distinctive Tajik national identity. 

Tajikistan is a secular state with a constitution providing for freedom of religion, but nevertheless it heavily regulates the practices of its Muslim majority. Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school has been officially recognized by the government since 2009. The government has declared two Islamic holidays, Eid ul-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, as state holidays.

According to a US State Department release and Pew research group, the population of Tajikistan is 98% Muslim. Approximately 87–95% of them are Sunni and roughly 3% are Shia and roughly 7% are non-denominational Muslims. The Shia part of the population predominantly live in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region and are followers of the Ismailite branch of Shia Islam.

The remaining 2% of the population are followers of Russian Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. Muslims fast during Ramadan, while about one third in the countryside and 10% in the cities observe daily prayer and dietary restrictions.

Bukharan Jews had lived in Tajikistan since the second century BC. In the 1940s, the Jewish community of Tajikistan numbered nearly 30,000 people. Most were Persian-speaking Bukharan Jews who had lived in the region for millennia along with Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe who resettled there in the Soviet era. As of 2011, the Jewish population was estimated at less than 500, with roughly half living in Dushanbe.

Tajik cuisine is a traditional cuisine of Tajikistan, and has much in common with Iranian, Afghan, Russian, Chinese, and Uzbek cuisines. Palov or palav (pilaf) (Tajik: палав), also called osh (Tajik: ош), is the national dish in Tajikistan, as in other countries in the region. Green tea (Tajik: чойи кабуд) is the national drink. Of course, samsa varaki are also insanely popular as well – more on them in a moment.

Palav or osh, generically known as plov (pilaf), is a rice dish made with julienne cut carrot, and pieces of meat, all fried together in vegetable oil or mutton fat in a special cookware called deg (a wok-shaped cauldron) over an open flame. The meat is cubed before or after being cooked, the carrots can be yellow or orange, and the rice is colored yellow or orange by the frying carrots and the oil. The dish is eaten communally from a single large plate placed at the center of the table, often in with one’s hands in the traditional way.

Another traditional dish that is still eaten with hands from a communal plate is qurutob (Tajik: қурутоб), whose name describes the preparation method: qurut (Tajik: қурут, dried balls of salty cheese) is dissolved in water (Tajik: об, ob) and the liquid is poured over strips of а thin flaky flatbread (patyr or fatir, Tajik: фатир, or more accurately фатир равғанӣ, fatir ravghani, i.e., fatir made with butter or tallow for flakiness).

Before serving the dish is topped with onions fried in oil until golden and topped with fresh seasonal vegetables. No meat is added. Qurutob is considered as one of the national dishes, predominantly consumed in the Southern regions.

Meals are almost always served with non (Tajik: нон), flatbread found throughout Central Asia. If a Tajik has food but not non, he will say he is out of food. If non is dropped on the ground, people will put it up on a high ledge for beggars or birds. Legend holds that one is not supposed to put non upside down because this will bring bad luck. The same holds if anything is put on top of the non, unless it is another piece of non.

Breakfast usually consists of tea, kulcha (Tajik milk bread) or non with butter, hasib (sausage), panir (Feta cheese), qaymoq or sarshir, murabbā (jam), tukhmbiryān (omelettes with meat), etc. Fruits such as berries, grapes, melons, apples, peaches, and apricots are eaten too during the summer. Kompot (a non-alcoholic sweet beverage that may be served hot or cold and is made with fruits) is often drunk as well.

Traditional Tajik soups include mainly meat and vegetable soups (such as shurbo and piti), and meat soups with noodles (such as laghmon and ugro). Other dishes shared regionally, either as fast food or as an appetizer, include manti (steamed meat dumplings), tushbera (pelmeni), sambusa (a triangular pastry with either a meat and onion stuffing or a pumpkin and onion stuffing, baked in a tandoor oven), and belyash (pl. belyashi, Tajik: беляши, deep-fried cakes made of yeast dough and filled with minced meat, similar to pirozhki).

Dairy dishes, usually served as part of the spread of appetizers in a Tajik meal and scooped with pieces of flatbread, include chakka (a sour milk preparation), thick yogurt, and kaymak (high-fat clotted cream). Qurut balls may be served as a snack or an accompaniment to cold beverages. Although not a traditional Tajik drink, kefir, a drinking yogurt, is often served with breakfast.

In the summer, Tajikistan abounds in produce and fruit; its grapes and melons were famous throughout the former Soviet Union. The bazaar also sells pomegranates, apricots, plums, peaches, apples, pears, figs, and persimmons.

Tea generally accompanies every meal and is frequently offered between meals as a gesture of hospitality to guests and visitors. It is served hot in a china pot with a lid, and is drunk with sugar from small saucer-less cups without handles (piola). Because of the universal popularity of tea-drinking, the choykhona, or teahouse, is the most common gathering place in Tajikistan, and is similar to the Western-style coffee house.

Samsa (Kazakh: samsa, Kyrgyz: самса, Uyghur: سامسا, Uzbek: сомса, somsa, Turkmen: somsa, Turkish: sambusek, Tajik: самбӯса, romanized: sambüsa, Persian: سمبوسه) from the Persian samosa, is a savory pastry of the Central Asian cuisines. It represents a bun stuffed with meat and sometimes with vegetables.

In the countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey and Iran, as well as in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China, samsas are almost always baked. In contrast to South Asian samosas they are rarely fried. The traditional samsa is often baked in the tandoor, which is a special clay oven. The dough can be a simple bread dough or a layered pastry dough.

The most common filling for traditional samsa is a mixture of minced lamb and onions, but chicken, minced beef and cheese varieties are also quite common from street vendors. Samsas with other fillings, such as potato or pumpkin (usually only when in season), can also be found.

In Central Asia, samsas are often sold on the streets as a hot snack. They are sold at kiosks, where only samsas are made, or alternatively, at kiosks where other fast foods (such as hamburgers) are sold. Many grocery stores also buy samsas from suppliers and resell them. Some related or similar dishes include the deep fried Indian snack with a similar name, the samosa.

In Tajik cuisine, sambusa-i varaki are meat-filled pastries, usually triangle-shaped. The filling can be made with ground beef (or the more traditional mutton mixed with tail fat) and then onions, spices, cumin seeds and other seasonings before being baked in a tandyr.

Samsa varaki would traditionally be enjoyed with the combined lamb meat and tail fat of the acclaimed fat-tailed sheep that is endemic to the region. It is supremely delicious, but it just isn’t available anywhere in the United States – trust Me, I’ve been looking for years! To make do, I call for regular ground fatty lamb and add some rendered lamb fat to the dough enclosing the filling.

As most Tajik cuisine is not heavily-seasoned, I prefer to add a hint of herbs and spices that are found in other parts of the Silk Road – star anise and spearmint being the two primary ones. Dried spearmint of quality may be purchased from here. Wild cumin seeds ARE classically used in Tajikistan with samsa varaki, and I heartily endorse using them – you can buy excellent quality ones from here.

Samsa varaki are traditionally decorated with a scattering of nigella seeds – they are exceedingly delicious and may be purchased from here. The top would also be sprinkled with salt, but I eccentrically prefer to use the delicious Icelandic flaky sea salt that is smoked with birch wood – you can grab a bottle from here and trust me, it’s worth it to add to these delicious samsa varaki! 😀

Tajik dishes are not difficult to make and I hope you see fit to attempting this recipe for samsa varaki in the nearest of futures, My beloved Citizens! TFD Nation deserves no less and neither do your honored guests!

Battle on – the Generalissimo

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