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Fowl Pilau
Stew a young fowl in half a gallon of good veal broth, with the following spices fastened in a muslin bag. Of cloves, allspice, mace, and peppercorns, each a quarter of an ounce, coriander-seed and cinnamon, half an ounce, and forty cardamom seeds, all pounded. Soak one pound of good rice in water for ten minutes, drain and fry it with two ounces of butter until slightly browned, then add it to the broth, and stew until the fowl is tender, and nearly without moisture. Have ready six slices of bacon, curled and grilled, and a couple of onions, sliced and fried a nice brown. Pile the fowl in the middle of a dish with the rice over it, and garnish with the bacon, fried onions, and hard-boiled eggs. Cut into quarters. Time, half an hour to stew without rice; half an hour with it. Probable cost, 4s. 3d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian anglicised pilau: bird and rice cooked in one spiced broth, then assembled as a garnished mound. Two things need attention before you start — the volume of liquid and the weight of whole spice.
- The spice bag is enormousThe spice bag is large -- read literally, a quarter ounce each of cloves, allspice, mace and peppercorns is 1 oz, and if the half-ounce applies to coriander and cinnamon each that is another 1 oz, so up to about 57 g of whole spice before the cardamom; if the half-ounce covers the two together the total is nearer 42 g. Either way, pounded and bagged it will throw a very assertive broth; halving the cloves and cinnamon in particular gives something closer to modern taste.
- Half a gallon of brothThat is 8 US cups / just under 2 litres in the British Imperial measure of the book, closer to 2.3 litres. It is far more than a pound of rice will absorb, which is why the method says to stew "nearly without moisture" — expect to ladle broth off partway, and keep it for gravy or soup.
- "A young fowl"A young bird rather than a stewing hen; a modern 3–3½ lb / 1.4–1.6 kg chicken behaves much the same way, while a supermarket roaster of 5 lb will not be tender inside the hour the recipe allows.
- Rice ratio and typeOne pound is about 2⅓ cups of long-grain, which will drink roughly 4–4½ cups of the broth. Basmati suits the spicing and only wants the ten-minute soak given here; short-grain will turn to porridge under half an hour of stewing.
- Frying the rice firstThe two ounces of butter and the light browning are what keep the grains separate through a long braise. Do not skip it and do not colour past pale gold, or the rice tastes toasted rather than nutty.
- CardamomThe recipe says forty seeds, though Victorian cookery books often use "seeds" loosely for whole pods. If forty individual seeds are meant, that is only two or three green pods' worth, a pod holding roughly ten to twenty seeds; if forty pods are meant the spicing is far heavier.
- The dangling instruction"Cut into quarters" most likely refers to the hard-boiled eggs of the previous sentence rather than the fowl, though the text is ambiguous.
- Temperature and timingHalf an hour of stewing before the rice goes in and half an hour after assumes a bare simmer on the stovetop. Check the thigh reads 165 F / 74 C before serving; a small bird will usually get there, but the rice, not the chicken, sets the clock here.
- YieldFour to five as the book says, and generously so — a pound of rice is a lot of pilau for four.
Pilau (pulao, pilaf) reached the British table through contact with India, and by the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s–80s it had been thoroughly domesticated: veal broth instead of stock made from the bird's own bones, butter instead of ghee, and a garnish of curled grilled bacon and hard-boiled eggs that owes far more to the English breakfast than to anything in Lucknow or Persia. The whole-spice muslin bag means the seasoning is infused and then removed rather than ground into the rice. Sliced onions fried brown as a garnish is one detail that does descend faithfully from the South Asian original, where birista tops the rice.