Home › Cereals › Turkish Pilaf II
Turkish Pilaf II
1 cup Brown Stock, highly 1/2 cup washed rice 3/4 cup tomatoes, stewed and strained seasoned 3 tablespoons butter Add tomato to stock, and heat to boiling-point; add rice, and steam until rice is soft; stir in butter with a fork, and keep uncovered that steam may escape. Serve in place of a vegetable, or as border for curried or fricasseed meat.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the book's two-column typesetting; read it as 1 cup highly seasoned brown stock, 1/2 cup washed rice, 3/4 cup stewed and strained tomatoes, and 3 tablespoons butter. The trailing "1/3 cup rice, 3 tablespoons butter" is stray type from the neighbouring recipe.
- Liquid to rice ratio1 cup stock plus 3/4 cup strained tomato to 1/2 cup rice is roughly 3.5 parts liquid to 1, which is very generous. Expect it to take longer than a standard absorption pilaf, and expect some liquid still in the pan when the grains are soft.
- "Steam until rice is soft"Most likely gentle covered cooking on the stove rather than a steamer basket, though the book elsewhere steams rice in a double boiler, so either reading is possible. Bring the tomato-stock mixture to a boil, add the rice, drop to the lowest heat and leave it alone rather than stirring, which is what turns pilaf sticky.
- Keep uncovered at the endThe instruction to uncover after the butter goes in is the hinge. Five minutes off the heat with the lid off lets surface moisture escape so the grains stay separate; covered, they steam themselves soft.
- Stir with a forkA fork separates the grains without crushing them. A spoon compresses cooked rice into paste.
- Brown stockA dark beef stock, well seasoned; the recipe specifies "highly seasoned." Unsalted commercial broth will make a flat pilaf; taste and season the liquid before the rice goes in, since you cannot correct it well afterwards.
- Stewed and strained tomatoesTomatoes cooked down and pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seeds; canned tomatoes were already common by this date and would have served. Passata or strained canned tomatoes are the direct equivalent; avoid seasoned pasta sauce.
- YieldHalf a cup of raw rice with this much liquid gives roughly 1.5 to 2 cups cooked, enough for two or three as a side dish or as the border ring the recipe suggests.
The book gives two Turkish pilafs, and this second one — rice cooked in meat stock and tomato, then finished with butter — reflects the late nineteenth-century American interest in "foreign" cookery. The word is generally traced from Persian polow through Turkish pilav. Rice dishes of this kind were grouped with the grains rather than among vegetables or entrees, and the note to serve it "in place of a vegetable, or as border for curried or fricasseed meat" shows it doing the work that a starch side dish does now. Rings and borders of rice around a sauced meat were a familiar serving style of the period.