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Indian Pooloot
Truss a fowl in the ordinary way for boiling. Have ready a quart of stock and a pound of rice that has been parboiled for five minutes, and then drained from the water. Put the fowl with them into a stewpan over a slow fire. Add some onion-juice (pound half a dozen, and extract all their moisture by squeezing them in a thin cloth), a table-spoonful of ground ginger tied in a muslin bag, and the juice of a lemon. When the fowl is sufficiently done, keep it warm, and dry the rice before the fire. Have ready three or four onions, sliced and nicely fried in butter. Cut up the fowl into neat pieces, and fry these in the same butter, then pile the rice in the centre of a dish, the joints of fowl on the top, and the sliced onions next the fowl lightly scattered. Strew stewed cardamoms and peppercorns all over. Garnish with fried cured bacon and slices of hard-boiled eggs. Serve hot. Time to boil fowl, three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient for four or five persons.
An Anglo-Indian pilau, built in one pan and then assembled on the dish. The hinge is the liquid: a pound of rice going into a quart of stock with a whole fowl on top means the rice absorbs the stock rather than swimming in it, so keep the heat genuinely low and resist stirring.
- The fowlA trussed boiling fowl was an older, tougher bird. Use a 3 1/2""4 lb chicken and expect the stated three-quarters of an hour at a bare simmer to be about right; check the thigh joint reaches 165F before you set the bird aside.
- Quart and poundQuant and pound " An imperial quart is 40 fl oz, so about 5 cups of stock; a pound of rice is roughly 2 1/4 cups of long-grain or basmati. That is more liquid than a standard absorption ratio, though the rice has been parboiled and the stewing is slow; covering the pan will help.
- ParboilingFive minutes in boiling water, then a thorough drain, is what keeps the grains separate. Rinse the rice first until the water runs clear if you want the same effect with modern polished basmati.
- Onion juicePounding six onions and wringing them in cloth yields perhaps 1/2 cup of sharp juice. A blender and a fine sieve do it in a minute; the pulp can go into the frying onions later.
- Ground ginger in a bagA tablespoon of dried ground ginger tied in muslin gives a warm, dusty heat quite unlike fresh root. If you substitute fresh ginger use a 2-inch piece, sliced, in the bag.
- Drying the rice"Before the fire" means uncovered in gentle dry heat. Spread it in a shallow tray in a 250F oven for ten minutes, or leave it covered with a cloth off the heat so the cloth takes up the steam.
- The whole spicesStewed cardamoms and peppercorns strewn over the dish are a period garnish, not something to chew through. Say so at the table, or crack the cardamom pods and use only the seeds.
- Assembly and yieldEverything is fried in the same butter in sequence "" onions, then the jointed fowl "" so the fond builds. Serves four to five as written, and it does not reheat well once the rice has been dried.
"Pooloot" is one of many Victorian attempts at the word that reaches English more usually as pilau, pilaff or pulao, generally traced to the Persian pulaw, though the route into English is uncertain. Cassell's, compiled for British households in the nineteenth century, carried a whole family of such dishes brought back from India by returning officials and their cooks, and this one shows the usual signs of translation: the fowl is trussed "in the ordinary way for boiling" as if for an English dinner, the aromatics are dried ginger from the grocer's rather than a fresh masala, and the garnish of cured bacon and hard-boiled egg is pure British sideboard. The technique underneath is nonetheless sound pilau practice "" parboiled rice finished in a measured quantity of stock, then dried and piled with the meat and fried onions arranged over it "" and the fried-onion topping echoes the birista still scattered over pulao and biryani today.