Polow Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Polow is an Iranian rice dish in which cooked rice is combined with other ingredients. Held in high regard as a dish of the Persian court, it later settled into the cities as everyday home cooking. Polow today is made by washing the rice, soaking it, boiling it and draining it, then coating it with fat and steaming it over the gentlest heat. Cooked this way, the grains do not stick together but come out plump and separate. Saffron adds a golden color and its scent.

The rice at its heart is an old grain of the Old World, and it had reached the Iranian plateau in antiquity. Along the Caspian shore, in Mazandaran and Gilan, rice was grown from early on and was a familiar ingredient rooted in the land.

At the Safavid court, rice dishes were held in particular esteem. The early sixteenth-century cookbook Kar-nama (by Bavarchi, 1521), written for an aristocratic patron, and the Madat al-Hayat of 1594–95, which records dishes made at the royal court and gives four of its six chapters on dishes to rice, both give recipes for polow. By the end of the sixteenth century, rice had grown into a major branch of Iranian cooking. The polow of these cookbooks, however, was made differently from today's, and the rice was cooked in a single pot. The present-day sequence of washing, soaking, boiling, and steaming is set out in detail in a Qajar-era cookbook of 1883.

As a Persian word, polow first appears in the fourteenth century, in the writings of Ubayd Zakani (died around 1370). The name passed directly into the names of rice dishes in many lands: pulao in India, pilav in Turkey, plov in Central Asia, pilau in East Africa, all linked by the Persian name. Traced by name, polow stands at the head of this family. Biryani in South Asia is also counted among its relatives.

Records of rice dishes appear in Arabic cookbooks of the Abbasid period. Two thirteenth-century cookbooks, the Kitab al-Wusla of Ibn al-Adim of Aleppo and al-Baghdadi's Kitab al-Tabikh, describe rice, meat, and chickpeas cooked together with a cloth laid under the lid, a dish close to modern pilaf. The Persian word polow shows up in writing later, in the fourteenth century. The English word pilau is first recorded in 1609; it is said to have come from the Persian pulaw by way of Turkish.

One member of the pilaf family, the plov of Central Asia, has a famous invention story of its own. The son of the ruler of Bukhara, the tale goes, fell for a beautiful girl from a poor family and wasted away, and the great medieval physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) gave him palov osh as a restorative, and that was how the dish began. An Uzbek tourism guide presents it as a legend about where the name palov osh, the Central Asian name for plov, came from, and no contemporary record is offered in support. The story is set in Bukhara; it is not a tale about the origins of Persian polow.

So where did the way of cooking polow come from? On the side of the name, the chain from polow to pilaf, pulao, pilav, and plov starts from Persian, and the view that Persia gave the pilaf family its ancestral form leans heavily on that chain. On the side of the cooking, specialists part ways. Writing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica in 1987, the historian of Iranian cuisine Fragner described chelow, plain boiled white rice, and polow as techniques of Central Asian origin that were worked out and diversified in Iran during the first century of Safavid rule. In a 2015 article in the same encyclopedia, Mahdavi disagreed with this Central Asian origin. This way of cooking rice also developed back and forth across the Islamic world, Persia, Central Asia, and Mesopotamia among them, through trade and conquest, and no primary source assigns the birthplace of modern polow to a single city or dynasty.

The name of polow passed from Persian into rice dishes east and west. Whether its way of cooking was born in Persia, or came from Central Asia and was refined in Iran, is still unsettled among specialists.