The Empanada Was Invented on Four Continents at Once

Empanadas! The comforting pastry pocket filled with something delicious. We all have a favorite version we swear by. If you travel thousands of miles in any direction, you can find similar dishes:

• A crisp triangle of samosa in Delhi.
• A flaky börek in Istanbul.
• A Cornish pasty in Cornwall.
• A huge Galician empanada in Spain.
• A piping-hot Argentine empanada is my fast-food choice.

They aren’t the same food; they don’t even share a single ancestor. But they all solve an ancient culinary problem:

How do you turn a meal into something portable and edible without using a plate?

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It Started with an Ancient Idea of Food Inside Dough

Around 711–1492, the Moors brought Middle Eastern-style filled pastries (often compared to sambousek, fatayer, or samosas) to the Iberian Peninsula. During this time, Jewish communities also developed stuffed-pastry traditions within kosher dietary rules.

Both these ideas fed into what would become the empanada. The name comes from the Spanish empanar, meaning “to wrap or coat in bread.” Versions of filled pastries existed in the Iberian Peninsula long before the empanada crossed the Atlantic. Galicians and Medieval Spaniards made portable pies filled with meat, fish, or vegetables, a practical meal on the go.

Spanish colonizers carried the recipe to new territories in Latin America and the Philippines during the 16th century. Indigenous cooking traditions and later African influences added their touch with local ingredients, adapting the dish to the region.

In Argentina, empanadas became a national favorite, often filled with beef or pork. Cornmeal dough gave the dish a distinct New World flavor. In the Caribbean, fillings and seasonings reflect the region’s rich blend of cultures.

Today, the empanada is more than a stuffed pastry. It is a culinary passport with centuries of cultural exchange in a handheld package.

The dough was a kind of culinary suitcase.

In Asia: The Samosa

Most people think of the samosa as quintessentially Indian. But its documented history takes us westward.

Medieval Arabic sources mention sanbusak/sanbusaq/sanbusaj, while Central Asian versions became samsa. This filled pastry reached the Indian subcontinent through travel. Middle Eastern and Central Asian chefs cooked them in Delhi Sultanate royal kitchens.

And then India did what food cultures do: It made the newcomer into a tradition.

The fillings changed. Meat versions and vegetable versions were added to the list. Eventually, the potato-filled samosa became iconic. This is rather strange, considering the potato didn’t reach India until Portuguese traders brought it from South America in the 1600s. That’s three centuries after the samosa had already been a fixture at the Delhi Sultanate’s table. Let’s add this up: Three hundred years of samosas… and no potatoes. I love potato Samosas.

This samosa differs from the Central Asian samsa. The latter is often baked rather than deep-fried and commonly filled with meat, onions, or pumpkin. What India inherited as a foreign court snack, it sent back into the world as something unmistakably its own, potato and all.

The Börek And Its Many Names

Not quite the empanada. But it still needs to be mentioned.

Börek belongs to a broad tradition of thin-dough (filo) filled pastries, associated with the Levant and Ottoman culinary culture. It has a complicated history. Börek’s precise origin is greatly disputed.

The Börek is also a little pocket filled with something delicious. Another way cultures used the filled-dough concept. Rather than sealing a pocket, they turned the dough into layers.

This one is a little more personal. I can remember my grandma making these “cheesecakes” in her kitchen when I was growing up. We called them cheesecakes for lack of the original name, like spanakopita, borek, or any other Levantine name. To us, they were delicious little filo pockets layered one on top of the other, filled with spinach or cheese and coated with sesame.

And here’s where the two threads of this article actually meet. After the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, many Sephardic families, including Syrian Sephardic communities like mine, resettled across the Ottoman Empire, empanadas and all. They kept making their Spanish-style stuffed pastries for generations. But living alongside the Ottoman world’s own filled-dough tradition, börek, with its paper-thin yufka and endless fillings, the two traditions eventually merged. Spanish technique met Ottoman dough, and something new emerged: the boureka.

The Ottoman world helped spread börek traditions throughout southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, and Sephardic communities carried their own hybrid version wherever they went next, including, eventually, to Syria, and then to Venezuela. This is how our “cheesecakes” ended up in a very traditional English teatime, on a table thousands of miles and several centuries removed from Topkapı Palace or medieval Castile. Same instinct that made a Galician wrap fish in dough, or a Persian cook seal meat in pastry: take what’s around you, wrap it up, and pass it down.

The Cornish Pasty, Not an Empanada, But the Same Brilliant Idea

I am UK-born, so let me be clear. The Cornish pasty has its own history, and it is not quite a Spanish import. As kids growing up in a Latin country, my British dad would tell us over and over that pasties are uniquely British and definitely not Spanish.

According to him, the pasty’s story starts in Britain, and earlier than you’d think. In the 13th century, this dish was actually food for nobility, part of the upper crust (that’s really where the phrase comes from). It took a few more centuries for the pasty to become the working person’s meal we know today. By the 18th and 19th centuries, it had become deeply entwined with Cornwall’s mining communities.

Because here again, it was the perfect food. Designed for a working person to carry and eat, no table required. A thick crimped edge served as a handle, allowing them to hold it with filthy hands without contaminating the filling. Some miners never even ate the crimped edge at all. It was purely a handle, and it went straight into the mine dust.

As emigration stories tend to go, Cornish miners carried the pasty wherever the work took them, and the work took them to Mexico. In 1824, a company called Real del Monte brought in Cornish miners after the local silver mines flooded, and their wives kept making pasties for the men to carry down the shafts, as they always had back home. Local cooks adopted the pasty. The classic filling, swede, didn’t grow well in Hidalgo, so they swapped it for regional produce. Today’s paste (pronounced pah-stay, not paste like glue) is filled with mole, chicken, tinga, chili peppers, even pineapple or blueberry with cheese.

Two hundred years later, the evidence is still all over Real del Monte. A hillside cemetery with around 700 graves bearing English names. Houses with sloped red iron roofs that look like they wandered in from a Cornish village. Every October, an International Paste Festival flies the Cornish and Mexican flags side by side. A celebration for a snack that crossed an ocean and somehow ended up with a mole in it.

Spain: Empanadas Gallegas

The empanada gallega isn’t at all like the individual half-moon we’re used to eating in Latin America. It’s a large, flat, baked pie, cut into portions.

Galicia has been making some version of this at least since medieval times. A 12th-century carving shows people making an empanada at the Santiago de Compostela cathedral, the famous endpoint of the Camino de Santiago. So this dish predates the written recipe by centuries.

The fillings are very diverse. Galicia’s official tourism board lists options like pork, beef, sardines, octopus, cod with raisins, and tuna. Gallegos consider their empanada not simply street food but a main table dish. It’s a big part of household and communal eating.

It’s a reminder that before the empanada became a street snack, it started as something a family prepared together and shared around a table.

Latin America: A Spanish Idea With Many American Identities

Once the empanada crossed the Atlantic, it met with local produce like maize, potatoes, peppers, local meats, Indigenous foodways, African culinary traditions, and entirely different regional cultures. Here’s how some of the nations enjoy this worldwide dish.

Argentina

There is no single Argentine empanada. Argentina is a perfect example of the empanada becoming a national food with many diverse recipes.

The Argentine government emphasizes the extraordinary regional diversity: Tucumán, Salta, Mendoza, Patagonia, and other regions have their own versions. Tucumán’s empanadas are associated with a distinctive repulgue, meaning a folded edge. Salteñas tend to be smaller and highly seasoned.

Chile 

Chile’s classic empanada de pino is another beautiful example of a delicious empanada. This one is for parties, more than on the run. The filling combines beef, onion, egg, olives, and often raisins, wrapped in wheat-flour dough and baked.

And culturally, it has become inseparable from Fiestas Patrias, Chile’s September national celebrations. Chile Travel describes the empanada as a symbol of gathering and celebration, commonly enjoyed with pebre, a traditional, uncooked Chilean condiment that looks and tastes like something between a spicy salsa and a chimichurri sauce served alongside an asado.

Colombia and Venezuela

Colombian and Venezuelan empanadas are made with corn dough, rather than the wheat pastry, and they are typically fried. Both are very similar and a big part of breakfast.

These crescent-shaped fried foods are made with corn flour and, in some cases, rolled plantain. Fillings range from meat and chicken to cheese, black beans, and cazón (baby shark, only in Venezuela) or pipián (potato and peanuts in Colombia).

The empanada may have arrived as a Spanish culinary treat, but the Colombian and Venezuelan versions are deeply patriotic.

Maize changes the dough. Local ingredients change the filling. Regional Colombian and Venezuelan cooking changes the seasoning.

African culinary traditions also contributed to the food culture. The dish is a cultural exchange between Indigenous maize traditions, Spanish ingredients, and African culinary influence.

Argentina and Chile bake wheat pastry with lard or tallow, which gives the empanada that flakiness. Colombia and Venezuela fry theirs in corn dough with no added fat, which gives them a crunchy, golden shell instead of a flaky one.

A Story of International Survival

Every one of these cultures figured out the same thing in their own way: put something delicious inside the dough, and you’ve got a meal you can carry, share, or celebrate. This is the whole story here.

The empanada was never a straight line from one country to another. It’s more like a map of human ingenuity, drawn in dough, filled with whatever each place had on hand, and eaten however each person chose.