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PILAU, INDIAN (another way)
Boil a chicken and two pounds of bacon in the usual way. Take them up; to keep in the heat as much as possible, lay them on a hot dish, and cover with a cloth doubled in five or six thicknesses. Boil up again two pints of the chicken broth, and put with it two small onions, six cloves, six peppercorns, and three allspice, and half a pound of rice. Simmer gently for three-quarters of an hour, or until the rice is tender, but unbroken. Lift out the onions and the bag containing the spices, put in the fowl to make it quite hot, place it on a dish, and pile the rice smoothly over it. Send the bacon to table on a separate dish. The bacon should be boiled in the same liquid as the fowl, in order to season it. Time to boil the chicken, according to size. Sufficient for three or four persons. Probable cost, 4s. 6d., with a chicken at 2s. 6d.
A Victorian Anglo-Indian pilau built around boiled fowl and a bacon joint, with the rice cooked in the poaching broth. Two things need attention: the rice timing and the salt.
- The rice timing is the hingeThree-quarters of an hour will reduce modern long-grain or basmati rice to paste. Basmati generally needs only a brief simmer and a rest off the heat. The rice available to a Victorian kitchen may well have stood longer cooking. The recipe itself says "until the rice is tender, but unbroken" -- judge by grain, not by clock.
- The spice bagThe text says to lift out "the bag containing the spices" but never tells you to make one. Tie the cloves, peppercorns and allspice in muslin before they go in, or you will be fishing whole cloves out of the rice.
- "Two pounds of bacon"This means a British boiling bacon joint — a cured, usually unsmoked piece of gammon or collar — not rashers. A 2 lb unsmoked gammon joint is the closest equivalent; simmer it about 20 minutes per pound.
- SaltThe bacon is boiled in the same liquid deliberately, to season the fowl and the broth. Cured joints today vary enormously in salt. Taste the two pints of broth before the rice goes in and dilute with water if it is aggressive, since the rice will concentrate it further.
- Boiling the chicken"Boil in the usual way" means a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, which shreds the breast. A 3-4 lb bird takes roughly an hour at a gentle simmer; the thigh joint should read 165F.
- Reheating the fowlReturning the whole bird to the rice pan to warm through, as directed, risks scorching the rice underneath. Warming it in a little reserved broth in a separate pan gives the same result.
- Cost and yieldThree or four people, as stated. The 4s 6d figure — with the chicken alone at 2s 6d — is a reminder that a fowl was the expensive item on the page, not the half-pound of rice.
Pilau is one of several English spellings of a word that reached English via the Persian pilaw and related Turkish and Urdu forms, denoting the family of dishes in which rice is cooked in a seasoned meat broth rather than plain water — a dish whose passage into British cookery is often traced to returning East India Company households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though pilau recipes appear in printed English cookery books from the mid-eighteenth century, and it was thoroughly domesticated by the time Cassell's was compiled. What survives here is the method: rice absorbing the liquor the meat was cooked in, whole spices in a bag, the bird buried under a smooth mound of grain. What has been stripped out is nearly all the heat and aromatics of the original — no saffron, no cardamom, no ghee, no fried onion — leaving cloves, peppercorns and allspice, the standard English pickling and boiling spices of the period. The boiled bacon served on its own dish alongside is a purely British addition, and a sign of how far the dish had travelled from its sources.