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RICE (a la Lucknow)
Put four ounces of blanched Carolina rice in a stewpan with one and a half ounces of butter, a bay-leaf, and half a pint of the liquor from a boiled fowl or rabbit. Lay a buttered paper over and cook for an hour and a half, adding more liquor as required. Season with pepper, salt, and a pinch of ground coriander-seed and cloves. Put this in little heaps round a hot dish. Cut some onions into dice and fry to a nice brown, and add a good seasoning of chutney. Put a little of this in between the heaps of rice. Fill in the centre with a pile of browned rice (see RICE, BROWNED). This is a tasty dish either alone or with rechauffes of cold meat, game, or poultry. Probable cost, 6d.
A Victorian pilau built on fowl stock, served as a ring of rice mounds with fried onion and chutney between them. Most of it translates directly; the cooking time does not.
- The hinge: ignore the hour and a halfFour ounces of long-grain rice in ten fluid ounces of stock is done in 18-20 minutes over the lowest heat, then 10 minutes off the heat to steam. The original time assumes a slow coal range and repeated topping-up of liquor; followed literally on a modern hob it produces paste.
- Quantities in modern termsFour ounces of rice is a generous half cup; one and a half ounces of butter is 3 tablespoons; half an imperial pint of stock is 10 fl oz, or 1 1/4 US cups. That ratio of roughly 2:1 liquid to rice is right for a pilau, so no extra liquor should be needed.
- "Blanched" riceHere it most likely means rice rinsed and dropped into boiling water for a minute or two, then drained, to wash off surface starch and keep the grains separate. A thorough cold rinse until the water runs clear does much the same job.
- Carolina riceThe standard long-grain white rice of the nineteenth-century British kitchen, imported from the American South. Any long-grain white rice stands in; basmati works well with the coriander and clove.
- The buttered paperA cartouche, a round of buttered paper laid directly on the surface, which holds in steam while allowing a little evaporation. Use it under a tight lid, or simply use the lid alone.
- Fowl or rabbit liquorThe strained cooking water from a boiled bird, lightly salted at best. Unsalted or low-sodium chicken stock is the closest modern equivalent; season at the end, as the recipe directs, rather than starting with a salty commercial stock.
- Seasoning and chutneyA pinch each of ground coriander and cloves is genuinely a pinch; cloves dominate quickly. The chutney is probably a sweet mango-style Anglo-Indian preserve, though the recipe does not say; stir it into the browned onions off the heat so the sugar does not catch.
- YieldFour ounces of raw rice serves two as a side dish. Scale up in proportion, keeping the same liquid ratio.
The name points at Lucknow, the Awadhi capital whose court kitchens gave Indian cooking some of its most refined rice dishes, though what is set down here is thoroughly Anglicised: a plain buttered pilau with fried onion, chutney and a whisper of clove and coriander, arranged in the tidy geometry of a late-Victorian dinner table. Cassell's, published in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, carried a steady stream of such dishes, translated into terms a British cook with a coal range could manage. The closing note is the giveaway about its real purpose: it is offered alongside rechauffes — reheated dishes made from cold meat — and priced at sixpence. Rice, stock left from boiling a fowl, an onion and a spoonful of chutney turned scraps into a served dish, which was much of what a household cookery dictionary was for.