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Chicken, Pilaff Of
Cut a chicken into neat joints. Lay them in a stewpan with enough water or stock to half cover the pieces. Put on the lid and let the contents of the pan come to the boil. Skim the stock, then add two ounces of rice and a little salt to it. Let all simmer slowly about three-quarters of an hour or till the chicken is tender. Then pile the joints of chicken and the rice on a hot dish. Season the broth nicely with salt and pepper, pour a little of it round the dish, then over all pour half a pint of hot tomato sauce.
A plain braise dressed up with a name borrowed from the eastern Mediterranean. The instructions are workable as written; a few quantities need filling in.
- Bird size and yieldCassell's gives only "a chicken", with no weight or number of joints, so the yield is a guess: a small bird jointed for the pot might serve three to four. Two ounces of rice (a scant third of a cup dry) is a token amount by modern standards — closer to a garnish than a side, and four to six ounces would be nearer a modern expectation.
- The hinge: rice cooked in the braiseThe rice goes in with the chicken and absorbs the stock as it swells, so the liquid level matters more than the clock. Half-covering the joints leaves roughly enough to hydrate a small quantity of rice; if you scale the rice up, scale the liquid up with it or the pan will go dry and scorch before the chicken is done.
- TimingThree-quarters of an hour at a bare simmer suits dark meat, but breast pieces will be dry and stringy by then. Add the breast about 20 minutes in, or use thighs and drumsticks only.
- SkimmingBringing to the boil and skimming before the rice goes in matters here: once starch is released into the pan the scum is much harder to lift off cleanly.
- Half a pint of tomato sauceAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. This means a cooked, seasoned tomato sauce, not ketchup and not raw purée.
- Rice varietyVictorian kitchens used long-grain Patna or Carolina rice, which holds its shape in a wet braise. Basmati or ordinary long-grain works; risotto or pudding rice will turn the dish to porridge.
- Salt twiceThe recipe salts the stock lightly at the start and seasons the broth again at the end. Keep to that order — the rice takes up seasoned liquid as it cooks, so the remaining broth will need checking before it is poured.
Pilaff is one of many English spellings — pilaf, pilau, pillau, pilaw — of the Persian polow, which travelled into English cookery through Turkey and, more directly, through Anglo-Indian households returning from the subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the time Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery appeared, generally placed in the Edwardian years, the word had been thoroughly domesticated: what it signalled to a British reader was simply meat and rice cooked in one pot, with none of the spicing, ghee or separately fried rice of the originals. The tomato sauce poured over the top is a purely European finishing gesture of the period, when a hot sauce sent round a dish of pale boiled meat was, it is often said, a common habit. The entry itself is telling — it reads as a lesson in stewing a fowl and using its own broth, rather than as a foreign dish requiring explanation.