Pilav Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Pilav is a staple of Anatolia in which rice is first sauteed in butter and then cooked through in stock. Grains that have drunk up chicken broth, moist and tender, are indispensable at the table both as a main and as a side.

What must be said about this dish is that its lead ingredient, rice, was a relatively new arrival in Anatolia. Rice came to this land in the medieval era: it spread through the Middle East in the wake of the thirteenth-century Mongol invasions, and by the fourteenth century rice was being grown in the marshes of Ayasuluk near Istanbul and in the Saruhan region. Only once rice had reached the land did a dish built around it appear.

From the fifteenth century onward, as the prestige of rice rose under the influence of Iranian culture, pilav came to be eaten as a dish of the Ottoman court, and in time spread to the cities and homes as a staple and a side. The Turkish name pilav was carried over directly from the Persian polow (also pulao), marking the branch of the pilaf family that took root in Anatolia.

Where rice was dear, pilav was also made from bulgur (cracked wheat). Rice pilav was the prestige food of court and city, while bulgur pilav was the everyday staple and side of the inland and the common table, and the two ran side by side according to region and rank.

That pilav branched off from the Persian rice dish shows first of all in its name. The Turkish pilav is plainly carried over from the Persian pulao and polow.

One book makes the route of transmission clear. The oldest surviving Turkish cookbook, Sirvani's Kitabu't-Tabih Tercumesi (from the reign of Murad II, around 1438 to 1451), is an expanded translation of the thirteenth-century Arabic cookbook of the Abbasid tradition, al-Baghdadi's Kitab al-Tabikh, and it includes rice dishes. Its author was a court physician from Shirvan, steeped in Persian culture, and the path by which the Persian and Abbasid ancestral form was taken into the Ottoman court is inscribed in this very volume. That it was set down in a cookbook by around 1440 tells us that pilav was being made in Anatolia at least by that time. Still, the year a dish first appears in writing is not necessarily the year of its birth, so this is treated only as a marker fixing the upper bound of the period.

To regard this dish as a matter of rice alone is to miss the reality of the region. Because rice was long expensive and scarce in Anatolia, pilav was made not only from rice but also from bulgur, cracked wheat. Rice pilav was the prestige food of court and city, bulgur pilav the everyday staple and side of the inland and the common people; the two systems coexisted by region and by class (a study of risiculture and environmental change in the Early Modern Ottoman Balkans documents this coexistence). In holding together both faces, the prestige surrounding the newcomer rice and the daily fare made with grain, the dish reflects the road pilav travelled in Anatolia.