Okra Pilau

Thursday evening the doorbell rang. Our visitors were two boys who live in the apartment building next door. Their basketball had sailed over the fence dividing our properties, landing in our yard. This is not an infrequent occurrence.

These are nice kids–well-behaved and remarkably polite. I retrieved the ball, then led the boys  to the side gate and showed them how to unlatch it. “You’re welcome to come get your ball any time. Just don’t tell the neighborhood how the gate works, okay?”

We shook on it, and they went home.

Back in the house, I began to worry. What if a police officer drove by the next time their ball went over the fence? What if I wasn’t home? Would anyone believe two young African-American boys had a white woman’s permission to open her side gate and to walk into her yard?

Just before midnight John woke me. “There’s been a shooting in Dallas.”

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I found this recipe in Southern Cast Iron Magazine, The editors credit Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart’s Mastering the Art of Southern Vegetables. Recipes being a game of telephone, Dupree and Graubart in turn credit an African-American cook named Sally Washington. We’re told Ms. Washington is “a genius,” but no further information about her is offered. Dupree and Graubart also say their four-ingredient recipe, calling for okra, rice, bacon, and water, is adapted.

The world of pilaffs, perloos, and pulaos is enormous, rich, and complex, spanning Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean; rice and the skill to cultivate it came to North America with the slave trade. I’ve scant knowledge of this branch is rice cookery. Even so, I know pilaus begin with onions softened in some kind of fat. Maybe chicken, maybe butter, but most likely that fat comes from the almighty pig.

Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s Seductions Of Rice has a brief section on North American rice cookery, specifically rice dishes of the American South. Below, they discuss a recipe from South Carolina’s Low Country, where North American rice farming got its start as a plantation crop tended by slave labor.

This recipe is an adaptation from several recipes for Carolina pulao that appear in Karen Hess’s facsimile edition of the Carolina Rice Cookbook….The dish begins by frying onions and bacon…Several of the original recipes calling for boiling the bacon and chicken, then cooking the rice with them in the flavored broth…

So yes, onion is necessary. Reading the above also tells us there are numerous approaches to cooking a pilau, and that mine is far from authentic.

Okra, like politics, insanely polarizing. Neither of us had tasted it (okra, not insanely polarizing politics) until a trip to Atlanta, where our hotel restaurant served a deep-fried okra appetizer. Years later, I can still taste that dish: a crispy batter shell coated searingly hot pieces of okra. It was impossible to stop eating it, unless we were stopping for pulls of icy beer. Hate okra? We had no idea we were supposed to. Somebody forget to send us the memo. Every night we returned from John’s soccer meet–it was the Power Soccer Nationals–ordered fried okra and cold beers, and got pleasantly blitzed. It was wonderful.

While the frying and then boiling with rice mitigates some of the slimy quality some people find so offputting, true okra haters should cook something else. Yeah, you could swap the okra out for another vegetable, but that just rips the soul out of the dish. And frankly, given my cluelessness on the pilau front, I have no interest in worsening matters by suggesting you insert artichokes or something.

So, okra pilau: I am certain this tastes nothing like what Sally Washington served. It is good, though, or it wouldn’t be here. Interested readers are directed to Karen Hess’s The Carolina Rice Kitchen and the works of culinary historian Jessica Harris, who specializes in African cooking, history, slavery, and the diaspora.