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Pish-Pash
1 tender chicken. 1/2 lb. (1 cup) rice. 1 teaspoonful whole white peppers. 1 hard-cooked egg. 1 tablespoonful chopped preserved ginger 2 sliced onions 2 bay leaves teaspoonful whole I white peppers 2 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) butter 2 tablespoonfuls chopped parsley I hard-cooked egg Salt to taste Water Singe and draw the chicken and then cut it into neat joints. Melt the butter in a saucepan, place in the chicken, add the rice, ginger, onions, bay leaves, whole peppers, cover with cold water, bring to the boil, and simmer for one hour. Season with salt and serve hot with the parsley and the hard-cooked egg, which has been rubbed through a sieve, sprinkled over.
A soupy Anglo-Indian rice and chicken dish, closer to congee than to pilau. The printed ingredient list has come down to us garbled and incomplete — the chicken and the rice, the two things the dish is made of, are missing their quantities entirely.
- The missing quantitiesThe list gives no amount for either chicken or rice, though both appear in the method. A workable reconstruction is one bird of about 3 to 3 1/2 lb, jointed, and 4 to 6 oz of long-grain rice; much more rice than that and the pot sets solid.
- Preserved gingerThis means stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in jars — not fresh root and not ground. Rinse the syrup off before chopping unless you want the dish faintly sweet.
- Whole white peppersWhole white peppercorns, left in the pot for perfume rather than heat. The line "teaspoonful whole I white peppers" is broken type for one teaspoonful. Fish them out before serving, or warn whoever is eating.
- Singe and drawInstructions for an undressed bird: singeing burns off the down and hairs left after plucking, drawing removes the innards. A modern chicken needs neither; joint it into eight pieces and carry on.
- The hour's simmerLong by current standards; jointed chicken simmers through well inside the hour. The extra time appears to be doing a job: the rice collapses into the broth and thickens it. Keep the heat at a bare tremble or the underside catches.
- Cover with cold waterEnough to cover the chicken by an inch, no more. The dish should finish loose and spoonable rather than dry, so top up with boiling water if the rice drinks it all.
- Salt at the endThe recipe seasons only at the end. As the liquid reduces and the rice swells, anything seasoned at the start will finish over-salted.
- The sieved eggA hard-cooked egg pushed through a fine sieve gives a fine yellow-and-white crumb rather than chopped pieces. Do it just before serving; it dries out quickly.
- YieldFour as a main course, or six in smaller helpings.
Pish-pash is Anglo-Indian nursery and invalid food, a plain chicken-and-rice pottage that travelled home to Britain with returning families and settled into English cookery books through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The name is of uncertain origin — Hobson-Jobson calls it apparently a factitious Anglo-Indian word — though it is often said to carry the sense of something mashed or reduced to a pulp, an accurate description of what an hour's simmering does to rice. In India it was the dish given to children, to the sick and to anyone who could not face a full curry, seasoned with whole spices that perfume the broth without biting. Its appearance in British recipe collections shows the second life such dishes had at home: stripped of context, reframed as an intriguing foreign novelty, and asked to look interesting on a plate — hence the parsley and the sieved egg scattered over what is essentially a bowl of savoury rice porridge.