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RICE PILAF: INGREDIENTS, TEXTURE VARIES

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On an American menu, the words “rice pilaf” mean … well, rice. There might possibly be another ingredient in there too, and by rights the double-barreled name should at least imply that the grains will be separate, rather than cooked to mush. Don’t count on any of this, though.

Most of the world’s pilaf cooks would be shocked. From India to the Caribbean, pilaf nearly always means rice cooked with something – meat, nuts, vegetables, fruits. (In our defense, we got our idea of pilaf, and the word pilaf itself, from the Turks, who happen to call plain rice “sade pilav.”) Texture is all-important, too. Throughout the pilaf belt, people wash their rice repeatedly before cooking it, often even soaking it overnight to get rid of the last bit of surface starch that might make the finished rice gummy. Once the rice is cooked, most recipes say to cover it and leave it over low heat to steam for half an hour or so. The careful washing and the final steaming ensure that the grains come out fluffy and separate.

These two elements are the soul of pilaf, a dish that takes rice in exactly the opposite direction from all the comforting puddings and risottos of the world. It is rice as a delicate heap of independent grains, each one infused with a subtle flavor from the ingredients they were cooked with.

There are two theories on where pilaf came from. Arguing for an Indian origin, the word is usually traced back to the Sanskrit pulaka, which would have become pulao in some later Indian languages. Now, pulaka doesn’t actually mean pilaf in Sanskrit; it means “shriveled or blighted or empty or bad grain,” which doesn’t sound very promising. However, it comes from the Sanskrit verb that means “to stand on end” (as in “my hair stood on end”), so conceivably it could have been applied to a dish where rice cooked up in distinctly separate grains.

Those who think pilaf originated in Iran can’t point to a Persian ancestry for the word. On the other hand, there’s no sign of pulao in India before the late Middle Ages, when it appeared in the Persian-based cuisine of the country’s Muslim rulers. Many Indian pilafs call for Near Eastern ingredients such as raisins and pistachios and have Persian names such as zarda (golden) pilau or “hazar pasand (thousand excellencies) pilau.”

Since the 15th century, five great local schools of pilaf have developed: Central Asian, Iranian, Indian, Turkish and Caribbean. Each has its own repertoire of pilafs and its own style of cooking.

Central Asia, which is basically all the countries ending in “-istan” except Pakistan, follows the simplest and most ancient recipe. You fry onions, then meat and then carrots; then you add whatever other ingredients you want along with water to cover and stew everything together. When the meat is done, you sprinkle rice over the stew (a shorter grain is preferred than in most pilaf-cooking countries), add water to the depth of one finger joint – “That’s canonical,” a woman told me in Samarkand; “that’s what it’s always been” – and boil until the only liquid left is the stew under the rice.

Finally you heap the rice up, cover the pot and steam over low heat. The advantage of this recipe is that it doesn’t require careful measurement. There’s always liquid under the rice to keep it from burning.

In Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and the rest of these countries, cooks stay close to this basic idea, getting a remarkable amount of variety by limited means. Except for wedding pilafs, to which they add everything they can get their hands on, Central Asian cooks vary the basic recipe by adding just one or two more ingredients, the most unusual being sour green apricots.

Iran is famous for its polos made with aromatic domsiyah rice. They are subtle and elegant, especially by comparison with the hearty palaws of Central Asia. The aromatic flavorings can be humble lentils or vegetables, but the most characteristic ones are based on fruits such as cherries, quinces or apricots.

Instead of being cooked on top of the stew, the rice is usually cooked separately from it and the stew is mixed in at the steaming stage. The reason is the Iranian obsession with tah dig (“bottom of the pot”), a golden rice crust that forms during the steaming process. It’s a point of honor to offer some of this crunchy browned rice to your guest, and people even brew a kind of tea out of tah dig. But obviously it won’t form unless you make sure the bottom layer in the pot is rice.

In India, you’re basically either a wheat-eater or a rice-eater. Madhur Jaffrey writes that when grain is rationed there, they ask you which you are and stamp your ration card with a big W or R. In the rice-eating south of the country, rice is a daily necessity; pulao is primarily a rice dish of the north of the country, a wheat-eater’s way of enjoying rice as a special-occasion treat.

This, as well as the extravagant court traditions of the Moghul school of cookery, has made India the home of some very elaborate pulaos. For instance, you might stew lamb with curry spices and yogurt, cook rice in the gravy and then bake the lamb in the rice with apricots, oranges, mangoes, grapes, pistachios, cashews and brazil nuts.

Turkey, on the other hand, sees pilav primarily as a side dish, rather than a main course. There are some main-course pilafs – several baked in filo dough, as a sort of rice pie – but most are simple and flavored with one ingredient, such as eggplant, mussels or toasted vermicelli. If Central Asian pilafs are hearty and the Persian style is elegant and Indian pulaos are extravagant, Turkish pilavs are shrewd and precise.