Pillau
Take cold fresh meat, either chicken or veal, and cut it up quite small after taking off the outer skin either fat or gristle. Mix it well with some cold rice, then stir this in a batter made. Of two eggs well beaten, and about one quart milk. Season with salt, pepper, and butter. Bake in a deep dish.--Mrs.
This is a baked rice-and-custard dish rather than a pilaf in the usual sense, and the original leaves the proportions loose. The hinge is the egg-to-milk ratio: two eggs to a quart of milk is a very thin custard, so the rice and meat must be plentiful enough to carry it.
- Proportions to aim forTwo eggs to a quart of milk will not set on its own. Figure on roughly 3 cups cooked rice and 2 to 3 cups diced meat, or add two more eggs; with the amounts as printed and less filling you get soup in a dish.
- "Bake in a deep dish"A 3-quart baking dish, buttered. The mixture should come no higher than an inch from the rim, since the custard will puff slightly before it sets.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Bake at 325-350F, which suits an egg-and-milk mixture; hotter than that curdles the custard and weeps liquid into the dish.
- How to know it is done45 to 60 minutes, until the center is just set and a knife inserted off-center comes out clean. A little jiggle at the very middle is fine; it firms as it stands.
- "Cold fresh meat"Fresh here means not salted or smoked, and cold means leftover roast or boiled meat. Any cooked chicken or veal works; a cooked pork loin or turkey does the same job.
- TrimmingThe instruction to take off skin, fat and gristle is worth following. Fat that was pleasant on a hot roast turns waxy in a cold custard base.
- Seasoning with butterButter is listed as a seasoning, not a cooking fat. Two to three tablespoons melted and stirred in, plus salt enough to season a quart of milk, which is more than most cooks expect - about a teaspoon and a half.
- YieldSix servings as a main dish with a green vegetable. Reheat covered and warmed gently.
"Pillau" is one of the many English spellings of pilaf, a word generally traced through Turkish pilav to Persian polow, and versions of it appear in English-language cookery books from the eighteenth century onward. In the rice-growing American South the term drifted a long way from its origin: by the nineteenth century a Carolina pillau (also spelled pilau or perloo) could mean almost any dish of rice cooked with meat, and here it has drifted further still, into a baked custard bound with rice and yesterday's chicken. That drift is the point of the entry. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, and a great many of its receipts exist to move cold meat from the larder to the table without waste - the dish is dressed in a borrowed foreign name, but its real subject is thrift.