Pike, Boiled
INGREDIENTS.lb. of salt to each gallon of water; a little vinegar.
Scale and clean the pike, and fasten the tail in its mouth by means of a skewer.
Lay it in cold water, and when it boils, throw in the salt and vinegar. The time for boiling depends, of course, on the size PILAU. in the rest of the butter; then add to the onions and mangoes in the stewpan and stew for an hour. Boil some rice (about 1/2 lb.) as for curry, spread it on a hot water dish, on this place the joints of fowl, or the cutlets, and pour over them the sauce.
TIME.-1 hour to stew.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Pilau (Fowl). (Based on M. SOYER'S Recipe; an Indian Dish.)-INGREDIENTS for dish for 5 or 6 persons. -1 lb. of rice, 2 oz. of butter, a fowl, 2 quarts of stock or good broth, 40 cardamom-seeds, oz. of coriander-seed, 1/4 oz. of cloves, 1/4 oz. of allspice, oz. of mace, oz. of cinnamon, oz. of 2 hard-boiled eggs. AVERAGE COST, 5s. peppercorns, 4 onions, 6 thin slices of bacon, Well wash 1 lb. of the best Patna rice, put it into a frying-pan, with the butter, which keep moving over a slow fire until the rice is lightly browned. Truss the fowl as for boiling, put it into a stewpan with the stock or broth; pound the spices and seeds thoroughly in a mortar, tie them in a piece of muslin and put them in with the fowl. Let it boil slowly until it is nearly done; then add the rice, which should stew until quite tender and almost dry; cut the onions into slices, sprinkle them with flour, and fry, without breaking them, PINE-APPLE CHIPS. of a nice brown colour. Have ready the slices of bacon curled and grilled, and the eggs, boiled hard. Lay the fowl in the form of a pyramid upon a dish, smother with the rice, garnish with the bacon, fried onions and the hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters, and serve very hot. Before taking the rice out, remove the spices.
TIME.-- hour to stew the fowl without the rice ; 1/2 hour with it.
SEASONABLE at any time.
The legible portion here is Mrs Beeton's fowl pilau after Alexis Soyer: rice fried in butter, a whole bird poached in spiced stock, then the rice finished in that stock and the dish built up as a pyramid. Several of the spice weights have lost their fractions, so treat the aromatics as a guide rather than a formula.
- The hingeThe rice goes in only when the fowl is nearly cooked, and it must absorb the stock until tender and almost dry. Add it too early and the bird overcooks while the grains turn to porridge; two quarts of stock to a pound of rice is far more than the rice needs, so expect to keep the pot at a bare simmer and uncovered enough for the excess to reduce.
- Spice quantitiesThe original gives "oz." for coriander, mace, cinnamon and peppercorns with no fraction attached, and only cloves and allspice survive as a quarter ounce each. A quarter ounce is about 7 g. Work to the cloves and allspice as your scale and keep the others in the same range; a full ounce of mace or cloves would overwhelm the pot.
- Cardamom"Forty cardamom-seeds" most likely means forty whole pods rather than forty of the seeds inside, though the wording is ambiguous. Pound them whole and take them out with the rest of the spices.
- The muslin bagEverything pounded goes into a cloth and comes out before serving. This is a spiced broth, not a curry: the flavour is meant to be in the rice and the liquid, with no gritty residue on the plate.
- RicePatna is a long-grain rice from Bihar, sold in Britain as the everyday long grain of the period; ordinary long-grain or basmati stands in directly. Wash until the water runs clear, then brown it in the butter over a low fire, moving it constantly, until it smells nutty and is pale gold.
- TimingsThe first time has lost its number; the recipe gives half an hour once the rice is in. Work by the bird for the first stage: a 3-4 lb chicken needs roughly an hour at a gentle simmer to reach 74C at the thigh.
- Fried onionsFour onions sliced, floured and fried "without breaking them" means keeping the rings intact for the garnish. Medium heat and a shallow pan of fat; move them as little as possible.
- Yield and costStated as five or six persons. The 5s. average cost is Victorian retail and tells you only that this was a substantial dish for a household with a cook.
Pilau, pilaf, pulao and pilaff are all the same word travelling west, and this version reached Mrs Beeton's pages by way of Alexis Soyer, the French chef of the Reform Club, whose popular cookery books fed a great deal of material into mid-Victorian English kitchens. Its presence in an English household manual is a mark of how thoroughly Anglo-Indian cooking had been absorbed by the 1860s: families returning from service in India brought back a taste for rice cooked in spiced stock, and British publishers obliged with recipes that kept the whole spices in a muslin bag and the heat modest. The pyramid of fowl smothered in rice, ringed with curled bacon, fried onion and quartered hard-boiled egg, is pure dining-room theatre of the period, closer in spirit to a Victorian dressed dish than to anything served in Lucknow or Hyderabad.