Boil 1 cup of rice in chicken broth; add a pinch of curry-powder and season to taste with salt and pepper. Boil ½ teaspoonful of saffron in 1 cup of the stock; then let all cook slowly until the broth is entirely absorbed by the rice. Serve very hot.
July 5 — No. 5
Indian
A pilaf-style rice cooked in chicken stock with curry powder and saffron. The instructions assume a cook who knows how much liquid rice takes, so that is the main gap to fill.
- Liquid ratioThe recipe never states the total stock. For 1 cup of long-grain white rice use about 2 cups of liquid in all, including the cup used to steep the saffron.
- SaffronHalf a teaspoon of saffron threads is generous and expensive by current prices; a good pinch, perhaps a quarter teaspoon, colours and scents a cup of rice fully. Steeping it in hot stock as directed is right, since the colour and aroma are water-soluble and need a few minutes to bloom.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powder of the period was mild and turmeric-heavy. Bloom the powder briefly in a little butter or oil before the rice goes in, or it will taste dusty.
- MethodBring stock and rice to a boil, then cover and drop to the lowest simmer for 16 to 18 minutes. "Cook slowly until the broth is entirely absorbed" means covered and undisturbed; stirring releases starch and turns the dish sticky.
- Rest before servingOff the heat, leave it covered 5 to 10 minutes and fork it through. This finishes the absorption evenly and is the difference between separate grains and a wet centre.
- SeasoningSeason with salt only after tasting the stock. Reduced or commercial broth is already salty, and the rice concentrates it as the liquid goes.
- YieldOne cup of raw rice gives about three cups cooked: a side dish for four, or two as a light main with the chicken the broth came from.
Rice cooked in seasoned broth rather than water is the basic pilaf technique found from Persia through Turkey, India and Spain, and versions of it appear in English-language cookbooks over a long period, well before the nineteenth century. A calendar collection like this one used national labels loosely: "Indian" here signals curry powder and saffron, two flavourings that households buying ready-made curry powder associated broadly with the East. Curry powder itself was a colonial-era convenience blend, standardised for export rather than any single regional formula, and saffron was one of the few luxury spices a middle-class kitchen kept in tiny quantities for colour. The dish tells you less about India than about how a cook signalled the exotic with the contents of the spice shelf.