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Turkish Pilau
A pilau, as really served in Turkey and Arabia, consists simply of rice boiled as for curry so that the grains are kept entire, mixed with a little butter, and seasoned with pepper and salt, then laid upon a dish, and stewed meat placed upon it. For Western use, a pilan is very good prepared as follows. Roast a rabbit a chicken, or two or three pounds of mutton; when the meat is sufficiently cooked cut it into neat pieces convenient for serving, and put these aside until wanted. Put the bones and trimmings into a saucepan with two ounces of lean ham cut into dice, or a little blanched bacon-rind, a sprig of thyme, an onion stuck with two cloves, a small carrot, half a dozen peppercorns, and a pint of stock or water. Simmer the liquor gently, and skim carefully until it is pleasantly flavoured and considerably reduced. Add some salt if required. Wash one pound of Patna rice, throw it into boiling water for five minutes, drain it, dry it in a cloth, put it into a clean saucepan with a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, and stir it about over a gentle fire until it is lightly and equally coloured. Pour over it a pint and a half of stock, and let it simmer very gently until it has entirely absorbed the liquor, and is quite tender and dry without the grains being broken. Throw in a little salt and white pepper and a tea-spoonful of curry-powder, and stir lightly with a fork to separate the grains. Pile it at once high on a dish, and place upon it the slices of meat which, a few minutes previously, have been heated but not boiled in the sauce made from the bones, etc. If a fowl has been used for the pilau, a table-spoonful of stewed sultana raisins may be placed on the top before serving. Time, about three-quarters of an hour to boil the rice. Probable cost, 4s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A two-stage pilau: meat roasted and set aside, its bones turned into a concentrated sauce, and the rice fried in butter before absorbing stock. The points that need translating are the rice handling and the timings.
- The hinge: dry the rice before it meets the butterThe five-minute boil, the drain and the cloth-drying exist so the grains fry rather than steam when they hit the butter. Wet rice will clump and the finished pilau will be sticky instead of separate.
- Patna riceA long-grain Indian rice, still sold under that name in the UK but scarce elsewhere. Any good long-grain or basmati works; rinse until the water runs clear, as the recipe's washing step intends.
- Liquid and timingOne pound of rice is roughly 2 1/2 cups; a pint and a half in imperial measure is 30 imperial fl oz, about 3 1/2 US cups. That ratio is generous because of the pre-boil, and the stated three-quarters of an hour looks longer than the rice itself needs — after the parboil it should be tender in 15 to 20 minutes covered over the lowest heat, though the book's time may be meant to cover the frying and simmering together. Check at 15 and stop when the liquid is gone.
- Two ounces of lean ham, or bacon rind"Blanched" bacon-rind means dropped into boiling water for a minute to draw off excess salt and smoke. Modern bacon is much less salty; a scrap of pancetta or a ham hock end serves the same purpose, which is body and savour in the bone stock.
- Reduce the bone sauce hardA pint of stock over bones, ham and aromatics should come down considerably, as the recipe says, to a small quantity of intensely flavoured liquid — though enough remains to warm the sliced meat through in it. Salt only at the end, once reduced, as the recipe directs.
- Heated but not boiledThe roast meat is already cooked; boiling it in the sauce will make rabbit and chicken stringy and mutton tough. Warm it through gently for two or three minutes off a rolling simmer.
- The curry powderAdded raw at the end, it will taste dusty. Stir it into the butter with the rice at the frying stage instead, or toast it briefly in a dry pan first — the recipe's own note that a true Turkish pilau contains no such thing is worth taking seriously if you would rather leave it out.
- RabbitA whole roasted rabbit yields perhaps a pound of meat and a good deal of bone, which suits this dish. Farmed rabbit is milder and less dry than wild; if using wild, keep it on the underdone side of roasted since it gets a second warming in the sauce.
- Yield and costFive or six as written. The "probable cost, 4s." is four shillings, a pricing convention the book uses throughout and of no practical use now beyond indicating this was not a cheap dish.
Pilau, pilaf, pilav and pulao are usually traced to Persian pilāw/polow, though an older Sanskrit root has also been proposed, and the technique — grains kept whole and separate, enriched with fat, cooked in a measured amount of flavoured liquid — spread with Persian and later Ottoman cooking across an enormous stretch of Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. Cassell's is unusually honest about the gap between the real thing and the English version: it opens by describing the plain Turkish and Arab dish of buttered rice under stewed meat, then frankly labels what follows as an adaptation "for Western use." The adaptation looks like a British-Indian dish, with its curry powder, its sultanas and its Patna rice, ingredients that reached the Victorian kitchen through the same channels as kedgeree and mulligatawny. The economy of the method is characteristically Victorian too: the meat is roasted and the carcass then carries the flavour of the sauce.