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Pilaff of Chicken
Pick over and wash 1 cupful of rice, put it in a saucepan with 1 pint of rich beef or chicken stock, 1/2 of a teaspoonful of salt and 1 teaspoonful of onion juice. Cover and cook slowly until the liquid is absorbed, then add 1 pint of stewed and strained tomato. In five minutes season to taste, then cook slowly until the tomato is absorbed.
Cut 1 pint of cooked chicken into dice, sauté it until a golden brown in butter. Turn it carefully into the rice, add 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, cover and set at the side of the fire for twenty minutes and serve on a platter.
A straightforward pilaf that cooks rice twice over — first in stock, then in tomato — which is what gives it its colour and its slightly soft, risotto-adjacent texture. The typography of the original has suffered: every capital "I" is a 1.
- The riceA cupful of long-grain white rice absorbing a pint (2 cups) of stock, then a further pint of strained tomato, is a very generous ratio of liquid to grain. Expect a soft, moist pilaf rather than separate fluffy grains; add the tomato in stages and stop when the rice is tender if you prefer it firmer.
- The salt measurementThe printed page gives half a teaspoonful of salt, which is what our text now reads. With a quart of liquid in all, start there and adjust to how salty your stock is, since the recipe has you season again later.
- Onion juiceA standard flavouring of the period, made by grating a raw onion and pressing the pulp through cloth. A teaspoon of grated onion, or a small onion sweated in the butter, does the same work.
- Stewed and strained tomatoThis is home-cooked tomato pushed through a sieve — closest modern equivalent is 2 cups of tomato purée or passata, or a 14-oz can of tomatoes blitzed and strained. Not tomato paste.
- Cooked chickenA pint of diced meat is roughly 2 cups, about 10-12 oz, which is the yield of a decent poached breast and thigh or the usable meat from half a small bird. This is a leftovers dish by design.
- "Set at the side of the fire"On a range, the cool edge of the stovetop. Use the lowest burner setting, or a 250F oven, for the twenty-minute rest — the point is to let the rice finish steaming and the butter melt through without further browning.
- Sautéing the chickenGet the pan properly hot and the dice reasonably dry, or already-cooked chicken will simply reheat and toughen rather than colour. Two or three minutes is enough.
- YieldServes four as a main course, six as part of a larger meal.
Pilaff — also pilau, pilaw, pullao — reached English and American cookbooks through two channels: the Ottoman and Persian dishes described by travellers, and the Anglo-Indian kitchens of the Raj, which sent "pillau" home along with kedgeree and mulligatawny. By the time it turned up in American household manuals it had often shed most of its spicing and become, in essence, rice cooked in stock with something added, which is what this version is. The dish stretches a small quantity of cooked chicken with rice, stock and tomato. The tomato stage is characteristic of American versions, though tomato pilafs exist in Turkish and Indian cooking as well; canned and "stewed and strained" tomato was cheap and widely available in the United States by the turn of the twentieth century, and it found its way into a good many borrowed dishes that had not originally contained it.