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Oysters, Pillau Of
Wash six ounces of Patna or small-grained rice in several waters, and carefully pick out the unhusked grains. Drain the rice, and put it into a saucepan with a pint of boiling and rather highly-seasoned gravy. Keep the pan uncovered, stir a little at first, to prevent the rice getting into lumps, and let it boil very quickly until it is quite soft, but unbroken, then throw it into a colander, and let it drain near the fire until it is quite dry. Pile it lightly round a dish, and fill the hollow in the middle with a pint of oyster sauce made according to the directions given further on. Serve very hot. Time, fifteen or twenty minutes to boil the rice. Sufficient for half a dozen persons. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
OYSTERS, PLAICE FILLETED AND STEWED WITH. (See PLAICE, FILLETED, AND STEWED WITH OYSTERS.)
A Victorian pilau in the English manner: rice boiled loose in seasoned stock, dried out, and banked around a pool of oyster sauce. Two things decide whether it works — the rice must stay in separate grains, and the oysters must barely cook.
- The oysters are the hingeWhatever the sauce recipe elsewhere in the book says, oysters need about two minutes in hot liquid, just until the frills curl. Held longer they tighten into rubber and leach out the liquor that gives the sauce its flavour.
- The ricePatna is a long-grain rice from Bihar, one of the standard rices of British kitchens; the recipe offers it or any 'small-grained' rice, and any long-grain or basmati stands in. Six ounces is a little under a cup dry, which is modest for six people — treat it as a garnish-scale portion alongside the sauce, or scale up.
- Boiling timeFifteen to twenty minutes suits the rice of the period. Modern long-grain boiled uncovered in plenty of liquid is done in 10-12 minutes; start testing at eight, since the instruction to keep it "unbroken" matters more than the clock.
- A pint of gravyAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 US cups — far more than the rice will absorb, which is deliberate. The rice boils freely in it like pasta and the surplus is poured off at the colander stage, so the gravy should be well seasoned but not so salty that concentration ruins it.
- "Unhusked grains"Hand-picking through the dry rice for husks and stones was necessary before modern milling and is no longer needed. The rinsing still is: several changes of water until it runs clear removes surface starch and keeps the grains separate.
- Drying near the fireSubstitute a low oven, around 250-275F, with the rice spread in a shallow tray for five to ten minutes, or set the uncovered colander over the pan of hot water. The aim is dry, loose grains that will hold a ring on the dish.
- ServingBuild the ring on a warmed dish and add the sauce at the last moment; the rice will go sodden if it stands. Two shillings and sixpence points to a time when oysters were far more commonplace on British tables than they are now, though prices were already climbing as the native beds declined.
Pilau — pulao, pilaf, pilav — comes into English from Persian, by way of Turkish and the Indian subcontinent, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was thoroughly domesticated in British cookery books, Anglo-Indian households being one likely route. What survived the journey was the technique of rice cooked in seasoned stock rather than water; what was dropped was almost everything else, so English pilaus of this period are often, as here, plain boiled rice used as a bed or border for a sauce. The oysters are characteristically British: for much of the century, before overfishing and disease wrecked the native beds, oysters were commonplace enough to thicken steak pies, pad out stuffings and be dressed as a sauce for fish and poultry. Cassell's places the recipe among a long alphabetical run of oyster preparations, which gives some sense of how routinely the shellfish turned up on a middle-class table.<br><br>The cross-reference at the end, to filleted plaice stewed with oysters, is typical of the dictionary format: the book was built to be consulted rather than read through.