The dosa is at least a thousand years old and still argued over
The dosa, a fermented pancake of rice and black gram, turns up in Tamil writing of the eighth century and in a 12th-century Sanskrit encyclopedia from a Karnataka king. Tamil Nadu and Udupi both claim it, and its thin, crisp style is the one that conquered the rest of India.
Where the dish began is unknown. The food historian K. T. Achaya reads hints in Sangam literature as a sign that Tamils were already eating dosa by about the first century CE, and dates the first clear written reference to eighth-century texts from today's Tamil Nadu, with Kannada literature following a century later. The historian P. Thankappan Nair instead places its birth in Udupi. Tamil Nadu's traditional dosa is soft and thick, while the thin, crackling version that spread nationwide first came from what is now Karnataka, and a recipe appears in the Manasollasa compiled by Someshvara III.
Udupi restaurants brought it to Mumbai in the 1930s, and after 1947 South Indian food caught on in the north, with the Madras Hotel in Connaught Place, New Delhi, among the pioneers. Merchants from Tirunelveli and Tuticorin carried it to Ceylon, where it became a distinct island version called thosai, and Tamil migration from the early 18th century took it on to Southeast Asia and beyond.
Rice and gram are soaked for several hours and ground, usually in a ratio of three or four parts rice to one of lentil, sometimes with a few fenugreek seeds. Salted and left overnight, the batter ferments, which raises its vitamin B and C content. A plain homemade dosa cooked without oil comes to about 112 calories, roughly 84% of them from carbohydrate and the rest from protein.
Variations are endless. Masala dosa comes with potato curry, paper dosa is wafer thin, and rava dosa uses semolina for extra crunch; Odisha's chakuli pitha is a close cousin with more gram than rice. On 16 November 2014, 29 chefs in Hyderabad made one 16.68 m long, a Guinness record.
Source: Dosa (food)
