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Pilaff
Clean and soak a breakfast-cupful of rice; put it into a saucepan with a piece of butter the size of a walnut, a sliced onion, pepper and salt to taste, and a pint of stock. Let this simmer slowly for about twenty minutes until the stock has been entirely absorbed. The rice should then be quite tender, without being in the least degree pulpy. Add two table-spoonfuls of grated cheese and the same of tomato sauce, and serve very hot.
A plain absorption-method rice dish, unusual for its period in trusting the rice to drink up all the liquid rather than being boiled and drained. The finishing cheese and tomato sauce make it closer to a risotto-adjacent side than to a Turkish pilav.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup in British usage runs roughly 8-10 fluid ounces. Treat it as 1 cup (about 200 g) of long-grain rice; the exact figure matters less than the liquid ratio you settle on.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly 1 tablespoon to 1 oz (15-30 g), depending on how the period writer reckoned it.
- A pint of stockAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, which is generous against one cup of already-soaked rice. Soaked long-grain rice normally wants about 1.5 times its volume in liquid, so start with 1.5 cups and add more only if the grains are still firm when the pan goes dry.
- The hinge: lid on, no stirringLid on, minimal stirring -- absorption cooking works best if steam is kept in and the grains are not agitated. Bring to a bare simmer, cover, and leave it alone; a rest off the heat before forking through helps. The recipe itself specifies only a slow simmer. Excess liquid and overcooking, as much as stirring, are what make rice "pulpy" in the book's phrase.
- Twenty minutesReasonable for unsoaked long-grain rice; soaked rice will often be tender in 12-15. Check at 12 rather than trusting the clock.
- OnionSliced raw onion dropped straight into the liquid stays crunchy and pale. Softening it in the butter for a few minutes first, before the rice goes in, gives a better result.
- Grated cheeseUnspecified; a hard grating cheese such as Parmesan suits it. Add it off the heat with the tomato sauce so it melts into the grains instead of stringing.
- YieldServes three to four as a side dish, two as a light supper.
The word reaches English from Persian polow by way of Turkish pilav, and nineteenth-century British cookbooks spell it a dozen ways -- pilaff, pilau, pillau, pulao. British kitchens of the period more commonly cooked rice by boiling it in a large volume of water and draining it, and absorption cooking, with the rice measured against its liquid and left undisturbed, was the less familiar method. The grated cheese and tomato sauce at the end are no part of Turkish or Persian pilav practice; they read as an anglicised finish of the period.