Forget samosas and put these 'samoosas' in South Africa on your must-eat list

Samosas are "samoosas" in South Africa; the oomph of that double "o" echoes in their pillowy fullness and straining seams. This snack is a central ingredient in the country's history, a specialty of the Indian people brought here as indentured labourers and Cape Malays descended from enslaved and free arrivals from south-east Asia.

Growing up in South Africa, we knew the best places to buy these spicy puffs: the local shopping-centre parking lot, where women of Indian heritage would hawk their unctuous, widely-cherished wares; and Johannesburg's Oriental Plaza, where we'd punctuate shopping trips for clothes and haberdashery with refuelling stops at the plaza's samoosa traders.

Now my siblings and I are attempting to construct these childhood favourites at Lekka Kombuis, the Cape Malay cookery school Gamidah Jacobs runs from her house in the Cape Town precinct of Bo-Kaap. We add spices to the beef and potato stuffings while Jacobs lays out delicate strands of samoosa pastry. "We're going to create a pocket, put the filling inside the pocket and seal it," she says. "The trick is to fold it as tight as possible."

Easy, no? Gingerly we fashion the pockets, stuff them, zigzag the parcels along the remaining line of pastry and glue the edges together with flour paste. It's methodical, perspiration-inducing work; if we don't seal the seams properly, stuffing will burst from the samoosas while cooking. Jacobs plops our wonky creations into a pot of boiling oil.