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Pilaff, Qua Pun Ming
Cut two pounds of lean, raw mutton into half-inch squares. Place in a saucepan with one and a half tablespoons butter and gently brown for ten minutes, frequently mixing with a wooden spoon; add a sound, finely chopped onion; stir and brown for five minutes longer. Add four ounces raw rice, stir well and cook for three minutes. Moisten with a pint white broth a gill tomato sauce and a gill demi-glace. Season with one and a half teaspoons salt, half teaspoon white pepper and a teaspoon curry powder, then add half ounce preserved ginger cut into very small dices. Mix well, cover the pan and set in the oven for thirty-five minutes. Remove, pour into a hot dish and serve.
A straightforward braise-in-the-oven pilaf, but the original assumes a professional larder: two kinds of stock, a made tomato sauce, and mutton. All three need a decision before you start.
- A gillHalf a cup, so a gill of tomato sauce and a gill of demi-glace together make one cup. With the pint of broth that is three cups of liquid to four ounces of rice — generous, and deliberately so, since the meat and the long oven time absorb their share.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable reading for thirty-five minutes; much hotter and the rice at the outside of the pan may dry before the centre is done.
- MuttonMature sheep, stronger and firmer than lamb, is rarely sold in the United States. Lamb shoulder cut into half-inch dice is the closest match and is more forgiving in a short braise; leg is leaner and will come out drier.
- White brothAn unbrowned stock — veal or chicken made from raw bones without roasting them, so the finished dish is not muddy. Any light chicken stock does the job.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown sauce, glossy and strongly meaty. Half a cup of well-reduced beef stock, or a spoonful of commercial demi-glace concentrate loosened with stock, gets you close enough; skipping it leaves the pilaf thin-tasting.
- Preserved gingerGinger cooked in sugar syrup, sold in jars or as crystallised pieces, not fresh root. It is meant to read as sweet against the curry powder. Fresh ginger is not a substitute here; use stem ginger in syrup, drained.
- Rice and stirringFour ounces is a scant two-thirds cup of long-grain rice. Once it goes into the oven leave the lid on and the spoon out — the three minutes of stirring in butter beforehand is what keeps the grains separate.
- YieldTwo pounds of meat with this little rice feeds four generously as a main dish. Let it stand five minutes off the heat before turning it out.
Pilaff is generally traced to the Persian and Turkish pilav, rice cooked in seasoned broth rather than water, a technique that travelled west through the Ottoman kitchen and into European cookery well before the nineteenth century — Glasse prints a "pellow" in 1747. What is striking here is how thoroughly it has been naturalised into the French professional idiom: the mutton is browned in butter, the moistening is a hotel kitchen's pint of white broth plus demi-glace, and the curry powder and preserved ginger are the era's shorthand for "Eastern" without much reference to any particular cuisine. The second half of the title is not explained in the book, and its origin is uncertain; it may be an exotic-sounding tag of the kind often attached to dishes in the international section of books of this kind, assembled for chefs and ambitious households, or equally a personal or hotel name. Mutton, meanwhile, was still a familiar sheep meat of the American and British table when this was written, though British and American consumption had already begun shifting towards lamb; its near-disappearance from retail butchery is a twentieth-century change, not a culinary judgement.