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Turkish Pilaf
1/2 cup washed rice 3/4 cup strained tomatoes 1 cup brown vegetable stock 3 tablespoons butter Add tomatoes to the stock, and heat to the boiling point. Add rice, and steam until the rice is soft. Stir in the butter with a fork, and keep uncovered so that steam may escape.
A simple pilaf built on tomato and stock rather than meat broth. The proportions are workable as written, though the rice will want a little more liquid than the original allows.
- Liquid ratioThree-quarters cup tomato plus one cup stock is 1 3/4 cups liquid to 1/2 cup rice — generous for modern long-grain rice, which takes closer to 1 cup liquid per 1/2 cup rice. Expect to cook it down, or reduce the stock to 1/2 cup if you want distinct grains.
- Washed riceRinsing until the water runs clear removes surface starch and keeps the grains separate. It mattered more when rice reached the kitchen dusty, and some rice of the period was polished with talc and glucose, but rinsing still improves the texture.
- Strained tomatoesThis means fresh or canned tomatoes cooked and pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seeds — closest today to passata or a thin tomato puree, rather than concentrated tomato paste.
- Brown vegetable stockIn meatless cookery of the period this was a stock made from vegetables browned in fat before simmering — onion, carrot, turnip, celery — for color and depth. A dark mushroom or roasted-vegetable stock is the nearest thing on a modern shelf.
- "Steam until soft"Cover and cook gently until the liquid is absorbed — roughly 15 to 20 minutes with modern white rice, though the original 'steam' may have meant a slower double-boiler method. The uncovered instruction comes only at the end, after the butter goes in.
- The uncovered finishThis is the hinge. Once the rice is cooked, take the lid off so trapped steam escapes rather than condensing back into the grains; that is what keeps a pilaf from turning to porridge. Fluff with a fork, never a spoon.
- ButterThree tablespoons for half a cup of dry rice is a rich hand by current standards, and it is doing the work that meat fat would otherwise do. Reduce it if you like, but the dish is thin without a fair amount.
- YieldHalf a cup of dry rice gives about 1 1/2 cups cooked — two small side portions.
Pilaf reached English and American cookbooks through Ottoman and Persian cooking, and the spelling wandered freely: pilaff, pilau, pillau, pelow. By the time it turned up in Anglo-American kitchens the word had loosened to mean almost any rice cooked in seasoned liquid rather than boiled in water, and "Turkish" served mainly as a signal that tomato and butter were involved. A meatless version like this one fits the meat-substitute cookery of the period, in which rice, pulses and cheese carried meals that would otherwise have leaned on a joint; browning the vegetables for the stock was one way of getting some of the colour and savoury weight of beef broth without the beef.