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Indian Pilau, Plain
Cut a fowl into neat pieces, remove the skin, and fry them in a stewpan, with four or five ounces of butter. Take out the fowl, and mix in a table-spoonful of curry-powder, a little salt, and some Indian pickles cut into fine strips; mangoes, however, are preferable, if they are at hand. Return the cut-up fowl to the pan and set the whole to stew very leisurely by the side of the fire for three-quarters of an hour. Have ready about a pound of well-boiled rice: it should be dry, so that the grains may separate one from the other. Pile it high in the middle of a dish, on which arrange the fowl, and serve with the sauce poured on the top and round the dish. Sufficient for three or four persons. Probable cost, 4s. 3d.
An Anglo-Indian dish of the 1870s and 80s, closer to a curried fricassee served over rice than to a true pilau, in which the rice cooks in the broth. Two things need attention: the pan will run dry, and the "mangoes" are not fruit.
- The hinge: add liquidAs written there is nothing in the stewpan but butter, curry powder and chicken, and three-quarters of an hour of that will scorch. Add about a cup of stock or water once the fowl goes back in, and keep the pan barely trembling; the intended result is a small quantity of thick sauce, not a dry pan.
- "Fowl""Fowl" in Victorian recipes generally meant a full-grown bird rather than a young chicken, tougher and more flavourful, which is part of why it was stewed rather than roasted. A 3 to 4 lb chicken cut into eight pieces will be done in 30 to 35 minutes; thighs and drumsticks hold up better than breast, which will dry out at the full time.
- "Mangoes" means mango pickleIn nineteenth-century English cookery "mangoes" and "Indian pickles" both refer to preserved, spiced pickles rather than ripe fruit. Use two or three tablespoons of oil-based Indian mango pickle (achar), sliced into strips, and hold back on salt until you have tasted, since the pickle carries plenty.
- ButterFour or five ounces is half to two-thirds of a cup for one bird. Two ounces browns the pieces perfectly well; if you want the period richness, stir the rest in at the end rather than frying in all of it.
- Curry powderVictorian commercial curry powders were generally built on turmeric and coriander, with cumin, fenugreek and ginger, and usually modest heat. Fry the powder in the butter for 30 seconds before the liquid goes in, which cooks off the raw, dusty taste that ruins this kind of dish.
- "By the side of the fire"A cool spot on the range hearth, not direct heat. The modern equivalent is the lowest burner setting with the lid ajar, or a 300F oven.
- The rice"A pound of well-boiled rice" is ambiguous. Read as a cooked weight it means roughly 5 to 6 oz of dry long-grain rice, which is the sensible amount for three or four people; read as a pound of raw rice it would yield far more than this dish needs. Basmati, rinsed until the water runs clear and drained well, gives the separate dry grains the recipe insists on.
- Yield and costThree or four servings, as stated. The 4s. 3d. is the original's shopping estimate for the whole dish, of which the fowl would have been the largest single item.
Pilau is the usual English spelling of a word generally traced to Persian polow, which is also the source of Indian pulao, and the dish came back to Britain with returning Anglo-Indian households; by the later nineteenth century curry powder and "Indian pickles" were staples of the British grocer. What the book prints here is an anglicised version: in a proper pulao the rice absorbs the spiced cooking liquid, while this recipe boils the rice separately and heaps it on a dish with the curried fowl arranged over it. The instruction to prefer pickled mangoes if they are "at hand" suggests they were not something every kitchen could count on having.