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Turkish Pilaf
1/2 cup rice. 3/4 cup stewed tomatoes 1 cup stock 3 tablespoons butter Strain the tomatoes and cook them with the rice and stock in a double boiler until the rice is tender; add the butter and stir it in without mashing the rice.
Serve as a border with meat or as a vegetable. If desired, a little catsup or Chili sauce and water to make three quarters of a cup may be substituted for the tomatoes.
A plain tomato pilaf cooked gently in a double boiler rather than over direct heat. The ingredient list is incomplete in the original, so read the method before you shop.
- The missing riceRice appears in the instructions but never in the ingredient list, and no quantity is given. The liquid called for totals about 1 3/4 cups, which suits roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of raw long-grain rice; treat that as an estimate rather than the author's figure.
- Double boiler, and whyRice in the top of a double boiler cannot catch or scorch, so it needs little attention and no stirring. Expect it to take considerably longer than a covered pan over direct heat -- plan on 45 minutes or more -- and check that the water in the lower pan does not boil dry.
- Strained tomatoes"Stewed tomatoes" here means home-stewed or canned tomatoes in their juice. Straining removes skins and seeds and leaves a thin tomato liquid rather than a thick pulp; canned tomato juice, or passata thinned with water, is the closest ready equivalent. Modern tomato sauce is thicker and may make the rice pasty.
- StockUnsalted or lightly salted stock is assumed, and no salt is listed. Season the liquid before the rice goes in, since a finished pilaf resists stirring.
- Adding the butterThree tablespoons is a generous amount for this quantity, and it goes in at the end; the recipe does not say to take the pan off the heat. The instruction "without mashing the rice" is the hinge: the grains should stay separate, so fold the butter through gently rather than working it in hard.
- The catsup substituteEarly-1900s catsup was thinner, sharper and more spiced than today's. If you use the substitution, modern ketchup thinned to 3/4 cup will read noticeably sweeter, so cut it with a little vinegar or use chili sauce as offered.
- Serving as a borderA border means the pilaf pressed into a ring mould or shaped in a ring on the platter, with meat and gravy in the centre. Pack it while hot and unmould at once, or serve it simply spooned alongside.
- YieldPerhaps four side-dish servings, or three as the starch under a stew, though this is necessarily a guess since the rice quantity is missing.
Pilaf reached American cookbooks through the Ottoman pilav, itself part of a family of rice dishes running east through Persian polow to Indian pulao, and by 1900 "Turkish" appears to have served English-speaking cooks as a loose label for anything from the eastern Mediterranean rather than a claim about a particular kitchen in Istanbul. What survives here is the essential technique — rice cooked in a measured amount of flavoured liquid until it has absorbed all of it, then enriched with butter and left in separate grains — without the spices, onion and lamb fat that a Turkish pilav would ordinarily carry.