Dholl Puri: Mauritius’s Favorite Dish is Indian, Actually
How a Bhojpuri stuffed bread crossed oceans and became the comfort food of a tiny African island.
When his father was growing up in Triolet, Mauritius during the 1960s, “no one sold dholl puri in the streets,” Navneesh Ramessur told The Juggernaut.
After Mauritius, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean, won independence from Britain in 1968, people experienced widespread poverty, malnutrition, and unemployment. Around this time, Ramessur’s grandfather Lolo and his cousin Radhe, street vendors who sold mithai like gulab jamun and ladoo, moved from the southern part of the island to Triolet in the north. As crowds of unemployed young men flocked to Anand Cinema to watch Amitabh Bachchan play the “angry young man,” the family spotted an opportunity: people were looking for something filling, cheap, and delicious.
Enter: dholl puri, a paper-thin bread filled with split yellow peas; cooked on a hot tawa with almost no oil; folded around butter bean curry, stewed taro leaves, and tomato rougay; and topped with pickles and green chilies. That’s what his family started selling “when they opened the movie theater canteen,” Ramessur shared. Other dholl puri carts soon joined theirs. Decades later, dholl puri is now Mauritius’s de facto national dish. But some locals don’t realize that their favorite food traces its roots thousands of miles east.