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Indian Pilau
Throw one teacupful of rice into fast-boiling water, let it boil for twenty minutes, then drain through a colander or sieve. Stir in one ounce of butter and a little pepper and salt. Pile the rice in a hot dish, garnish with quarters of hard-boiled eggs and surround it with onions fried till dry.
A very plain rendering of a pilau: rice boiled like pasta, buttered, and dressed with egg and fried onion. The only two things that decide whether it succeeds are the drainage of the rice and the browning of the onions.
- The hinge: dry onions"Fried till dry" means onions sliced thin and cooked in fat over moderate heat until they are deeply browned and crisp, then drained on paper — what an Indian kitchen calls birista. Soft, pale, sweated onions will weep into the rice and the dish collapses into blandness.
- A teacupfulPeriod equivalences vary, but a teacup is usually reckoned at somewhere between four and six fluid ounces, so roughly half to three-quarters of a cup of raw rice. That is a modest amount; double it if you want more than a light side dish.
- Twenty minutes is longThe rice of the period was likely a coarser-milled long-grain. Modern long-grain basmati boiled loose in plenty of water is done in 10 to 12 minutes; twenty will give you a broken, sticky pile. Start tasting at eight minutes.
- Salt the waterThe recipe seasons only after draining, which leaves the grain itself flat. Salt the boiling water generously, as for pasta, and use the pepper and salt at the end only to adjust.
- Drain and dryAfter the colander, return the rice to the hot empty pot off the heat for a minute or two, uncovered, so surface moisture steams off before the butter goes in. Fold the butter through with a fork rather than a spoon to keep the grains separate.
- One ounce of butterTwo tablespoons. Clarified butter or ghee is closer to the dish's ancestry and will not leave milk solids speckling the white rice.
- YieldAs written, two to three servings as an accompaniment. Two hard-boiled eggs, quartered, and one large onion are about right for that quantity.
Pilau is one of the many English spellings — with pilaf, pilaw, pulao and pilaff — of a word usually traced back through Turkish pilāv to a Persian original along the lines of pilāw or polow, though the route into British and then American cookery is less firmly documented than the neatness of the list suggests. What is striking here is how little of the original technique survives: a true pilau cooks the rice in a measured amount of seasoned stock so the grain absorbs the flavour, whereas Oscar's version boils it in plain water and treats the seasoning as garnish. That is the signature of the Anglo-Indian route by which the dish reached New York — recipes carried home by way of British colonial households, simplified at each step, until "Indian" survived chiefly in the name and in the fried onion and egg on top.