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Russian Pilaf
Follow recipe for Turkish Pilaf III, substituting cold cooked lamb in place of chicken, and add a chicken's liver sautéd in butter, then separated into small pieces.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: everything depends on the pilaf it points back to, and on two ingredients — leftover lamb and a single sautéed liver — that need different handling from each other.
- Find the base recipe firstThe Turkish Pilaf recipes in this book are generally built on rice cooked in butter with stewed tomato and stock until the liquid is absorbed. Read that recipe through before starting; this entry supplies only the substitution.
- Cold cooked lambThe lamb is already cooked, so it goes in at the end purely to heat through. Cut it in half-inch dice and fold it in during the last five minutes, or it will shred and dry out.
- One chicken liver is not muchFor a pilaf serving four to six, two or three livers give the dish more of the iron-rich note it is after without overwhelming it.
- Cook the liver throughSauté the livers in butter over fairly brisk heat until firm and no longer pink at the centre — poultry liver is a common carrier of campylobacter and salmonella. Let them cool a minute before breaking them into pieces, or they will smear.
- Rice ratiosThe original assumes non-converted long-grain rice. Rinse modern long-grain rice until the water runs clear, and add the stock cautiously, adding more only if the grains are still hard.
- Season at the endCold roast lamb is already salted and the stock may be too. Taste after the meat and liver are folded in rather than seasoning the rice up front.
- YieldA cup of raw rice with a cup or so of chopped lamb feeds four as a main dish, six as a side.
This book carries several pilafs — Turkish, Russian, and simple rice ones — under Cereals rather than among the meat dishes, which suggests how they were understood in an American kitchen of the period: rice was the point, and the meat was whatever was left in the larder. "Pilaf" reaches English through Turkish pilav, itself from Persian polow/pilāw, and by the late nineteenth century the word was used in Anglo-American cookery as a general term for seasoned rice cooked in stock. The label "Russian" here is doing very little geographic work; period cookbooks often attached national names to minor variations, and the distinguishing features are simply lamb instead of chicken and the addition of sautéed liver. The recipe reads as an exercise in thrift: cold cooked lamb and a chicken liver were both things a household might have on hand, and a pot of rice was one way of using them.