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Indian Pilau

A spiced rice dish cooked with butter, onions, spices, bacon, and a fowl.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Indian Pilau

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Put all spices into a muslin bag.

  2. Slice the onions very fine and fry them in the butter until brown.

Cook the rice

  1. Add the stock and ¾ lb. of white rice, well mashed, along with a few slices of bacon.

  2. Transfer everything to a flat saucepan and cover with 1 pint of water, ensuring there are 2 inches of liquid above the rice.

  3. When the rice is nearly done, place the boiled fowl, nicely trussed, in the middle of the rice.

  4. Cover the pot and let it simmer until the rice is dry.

Serve

  1. Remove the bag of spices before serving.

  2. Serve the rice around the fowl, garnished with hard-boiled eggs and slices of bacon.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cardamom + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,299 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Clove + cardamomtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,114 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Cinnamon + ricetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Cardamom + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together554 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-octenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

White rice
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the stock and water as it simmers.
Onions
Fried until brown, they add sweetness and deep colour to the rice.
Butter
Fat that carries the onion flavour and helps the onions brown.
Bacon
Adds savoury, smoky fat to the rice as it cooks.
Young fowl
Boiled and served whole as the centrepiece, with the rice arranged around it.

The step that matters

Simmering the rice until dry. Rice must absorb the liquid gradually under a covered pot; if the lid lets steam escape or heat is too high, the grains can scorch on the bottom or stay wet in the middle.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, clove, cardamom, egg, cinnamon, rice):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, clove, cardamom, egg, cinnamon, rice. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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