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Pilaff of Goose
Pick off all the meat from the goose left over from yesterday and cut into small square pieces. Heat half an ounce butter in a saucepan, add one finely chopped onion, one very finely chopped green pepper, and lightly brown five minutes, lightly mixing meanwhile. Then add four ounces raw rice and the meat, mix well and cook five minutes, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika and half teaspoon curry powder. Moisten with a half pint broth, two gills demi-glace and one gill tomato sauce. Mix well, cook on range for five minutes, then set in oven forty minutes. Remove, place in a lightly buttered pudding mould, press down the pilaff in the mould and carefully unmould on a hot dish, pour a gill of hot demi-glace around and serve. N. B. Cut the goose bones into small pieces and add them to the demi-glace stock pot.
A leftovers dish from a professional kitchen, which is why it assumes you have demi-glace on hand. The measurements are straightforward once the old liquid units are converted.
- Gills and half-pintsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of demi-glace is 1 cup and the finishing gill is another half cup. The half pint of broth is 1 cup; note that these are US measures, and if you read the book as British the pint would be 20 fl oz.
- Rice and liquid ratioFour ounces of raw rice is a scant 2/3 cup, going into roughly 2 1/2 cups of liquid. That is generous for long-grain rice; expect a soft, moist pilaff that holds a mould rather than separate grains.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the recipe does not say to cover the mixture. A moderate oven, around 350F, with the pan covered, is a reasonable modern reading for the stated forty minutes.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole sauce combined with brown stock and reduced until it coats a spoon. A good jarred demi-glace or a concentrated homemade brown stock reduced to the same body will stand in; plain broth will leave the dish thin and pale.
- Green pepperAn ordinary sweet bell pepper, meant to be chopped very fine so it disappears into the rice.
- UnmouldingThe recipe presses the pilaff into the buttered mould straight from the oven. Letting it settle briefly before pressing, and pressing firmly, may help it hold its shape when turned out.
- YieldTwo to three as a main course, depending on how much meat came off the bird. A mould of roughly one quart should be about right.
- The bonesThe closing note is sound practice, not a flourish. Goose bones give a dark, fatty stock; skim it well or the demi-glace will taste greasy.
Pilaff, pilaf, pilau and pillau are all English renderings of the Persian polow, and by the time this book was compiled the word had been in European cookery vocabulary for well over a century, generally arriving through Ottoman and Anglo-Indian channels. What is striking here is not the pilaff but the goose: the recipe opens with meat "left over from yesterday", the signature of a hotel or large household kitchen where a roast bird was carved for one service and its remains had to reappear in another. The half teaspoon of curry powder and the paprika mark the period's habit of gesturing at foreign flavour with a commercial spice blend, while the demi-glace and the moulded presentation keep the dish firmly inside the French professional repertoire. The instruction to send the bones to the stock pot is the real lesson of the page, a reminder that in a kitchen with a permanent stock pot nothing from a carcass was thrown away.