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Rice Turkish Style
Put three pints of clear stock into a saucepan with plenty of tomato sauce and salt and pepper to taste; when it boils, throw in one and one-half pounds of well-washed and dried rice, and let it simmer until the mixture is well absorbed by the rice. Melt a large lump of butter, pour it over the rice, and leave it by the side of the fire for a few minutes. When ready to serve, stir the rice well, and turn it onto a hot dish.
A pilaf built on stock rather than water, scaled for a hotel dining room. The proportions still work, but two of the quantities are given by eye and the finish depends on a step no modern range has by default.
- The hinge: rest it, then stirLeave the rice off the heat, or on the very lowest setting, for several minutes after the liquid is gone (the original says "a few minutes"), and stir only once at the end. Stirring while it cooks tends to break the grains and turn the dish pasty.
- "By the side of the fire"On a coal range this meant a spot warm enough to hold temperature but not to cook. Use the lowest burner setting with a diffuser, a covered pot in a 200F oven, or simply the pot off the heat with a folded towel under the lid.
- Liquid ratioThree pints is 6 cups. With 1.5 lb rice (about 3.5 cups dry) plus the tomato sauce, you are near 2:1 by volume, which is right for long-grain rice. Add the sauce as part of the liquid rather than on top of the full 6 cups.
- "Plenty of tomato sauce"Genuinely unquantified. A cup to a cup and a half of a smooth, unsweetened tomato sauce or passata suits this volume; more than that and the rice tastes of tomato rather than stock.
- "A large lump of butter"Read as 4 oz for this quantity of rice. Melt and pour it over without mixing, then let the rest period distribute it.
- Washed and dried riceRinsing until the water runs clear removes surface starch and keeps the grains separate; drying it briefly on a towel matters because wet rice throws off the liquid ratio. Basmati or another long grain works; do not use arborio or a short-grain rice here.
- TimingSimmer covered 18 to 20 minutes for long-grain rice. The original's "until the mixture is well absorbed" is the real test, but check at 18 rather than letting it sit on heat.
- Yield1.5 lb of dry rice serves 10 to 12 as a side dish. Halve or quarter it freely; the ratios hold.
- SeasoningSeason the stock, not the finished rice, as the recipe directs. Salt added at the end tends to sit on the surface rather than penetrate the grain.
Nineteenth-century menus seem to have used "Turkish style" loosely for any rice cooked absorption-style in seasoned stock rather than boiled and drained in the English manner, and it appears to have stood in for pilaf, pilau and pilaff interchangeably depending on the kitchen. The technique itself is Ottoman and Persian in descent, and had been circulating in European cookbooks well before this recipe was written down. What marks this as a hotel recipe is the scale and the reliance on house stock, which a New York kitchen had by the gallon and to which the tomato adds the color and acidity that would otherwise require a longer list of aromatics. The instruction to rest the rice beside the fire is the fingerprint of a coal range, where a cook would generally have had a range of temperatures available across the top plate and little difficulty holding something warm.