Grandma’s Rice
San Francisco Examiner Magazine
Ingredients:
butter
egg noodles
rice
chicken broth
slivered almonds
chopped dates
Preparation:
Melt the butter in the bottom of a heavy stock pot until it foams. Use at least a whole cube of butter for every three cups of rice. Even if you cook only one cup of rice, still use the whole cube. Melt the butter into a golden foam.
I don’t even consider margarine. It would be a disaster. I hide the amount of butter I use if my children are around. But if it’s others in my family—my parents, my sister or sister in law, my aunt—I melt the cubes with zeal, sometimes three for a big family dinner. They’re pretty in the pot, the sharp edges slowly rounding with the heat, the fragrance rich with promise.
Add noodles, a handful for every cup of rice.
You should use Golden Grain Flat Egg Noodles, the same brand my grandmother, Margaret Artunian Abajian, did. About fifteen years ago my sister told me our Aunt Sara was starting to use vermicelli instead of egg noodles in her pilaf. So we did too, crunching it up as we scattered it into the buttery foam. We thought it looked sort of stylish, I guess, little worms of brown noodles twisting about in the rice. Now I know better.
Be sure to stir the noodles constantly or they’ll burn in just a few minutes.
I’ve burned them many times over the years and have had to throw out the whole black mess, wash the pot and start over—a big waste of good butter.
Stir them into the fragrant foam and watch them constantly until they get really brown. Then add the rice.
I remember the family controversy when I was a child—over whether to use Uncle Ben’s Rice or MJB. My mother always told me MJB made just as good a pilaf as Uncle Ben’s and I wanted to think she was right. But the truth is my mother was odar, a non-Armenian, so couldn’t be counted on for the real scoop. And now that I know the truth of Grandma’s rice and how very difficult it is to get the rice perfect, I never use anything except Uncle Ben’s and, finally, neither did my mother.
Stir the rice in the butter mixture just until it starts to look translucent; it won’t take long. Then pour in the chicken broth. Of course, use only Swanson chicken broth. Use one can (141/2 ounces) of broth per cup of rice. As soon as the mixture starts to boil, cover it tightly and turn the flame to low. Simmer for twenty minutes. Then, turn off the heat and let it sit about ten minutes before removing the lid. Serve immediately.
Your rice will turn out to be Armenian pilaf. If you’re really lucky, it will be Grandma’s pilaf, rice that completely absorbs the buttery steam, so it’s lighter than usual, a perfect integration of the ingredients that tastes creamy and nutty. It’s hard to know exactly when the magic happens that turns Armenian pilaf into Grandma’s pilaf, whether it’s during the noodle browning stage, or the simmering. My sister-in-law (surprisingly successful at it even though she’s odar through and through) thinks it happens when the noodles get really dark before the rice is added. For years I thought it had to do with how quickly I put the lid on the pot after the broth starts to boil. Now I realize it’s something separate from the ingredients or the cooking instructions.
Mine is a family that’s really picky about how things are done, especially anything associated with food. When we get together, it doesn’t take long for one of us to start pointing out the right way to line the trash can, start the barbecue, or load the dishwasher.
One of my earliest memories is my father telling his sister, my Aunt Sara, that she wasn’t wiping the table correctly. “Turn the cloth,” he said from the sofa across the room. “Don’t use the same side of the junjotz over and over. You’re just pushing the crumbs around.” I was probably only six, but I knew he was right, knew there was clearly a right and a wrong way to wipe the kitchen table; I also realized it was a matter of grave importance.
I met my Uncle Eddie in San Francisco one Saturday to see a new photography exhibit at MOMA. We ate at a nearby restaurant and spent the whole meal discussing the lack of proper management in the restaurant, the quality of the service, the cleanliness of the tables. My cousin Tony and I sometimes outline our ideal careers—as restaurant designers, the ones who create the entire ambiance of fine dining from the food to the decor.
Tony called from Hawaii a few months ago to ask how to make Grandma’s roast. (Cook a watermelon-cut rump roast for about five hours at a low temperature. Cover it, but add nothing. Also, if you want it to taste like Grandma’s—juicy and falling apart tender, it’s critical you use a Guardian brand aluminum pan.) Tony was opening a Mexican restaurant on the north shore of Kauai’i and wanted to make tacos with her roast. Although his restaurant was a hit with the locals, he closed it down after six months when he found himself overwhelmed with the sheer work of creating the perfect roast, the freshest salsa and the cleanest tables, nearly single-handedly.
Grandma died in 1988 at 94 years old, yet we still invoke her cooking at every family dinner. Everyone knows the ultimate compliment is “Ah, the pilaf… it’s Grandma’s rice.” But it seldom happens; my Aunt Sara hardly ever eats much rice because it’s so infrequently Grandma’s pilaf. I realize now that I took Sundays for granted as a child—Grandma’s rice, her roast, the white damask linens, the small glass bottles of Coca Cola that ran the length of the table, the simple dependability of her meals.
My eighty-six year old father still makes lamb shish kebab for nearly every holiday dinner. Usually the men stand around the fire in awe and anticipation while my father presides, cooking the meat to perfection. Other than the rich taste of the grilled lamb, the best part of having shish kebab is getting it off the skewers, shishes my dad calls them.
Even though all of us cousins are in our fifties, we turn into children again as soon as we’re all together, taking on the roles we had when Grandma was alive. Randy is still quiet and mysterious, his brother Larry still trying to get me in trouble, my sister Susan practicing the art of relaxation, and my brother, the comic, the center of fawning attention. So when the meat is done (exactly 20 minutes after the rice starts simmering), we race to be right there, slices of good French bread in hand, ready to pull the meat from the shishes, the marinade-soaked bread the reward for good timing. As usual, Susan’s there first.
And in the kitchen, what’s turned ordinary pilaf into Grandma’s rice? What’s the difference between just making it and making it so that Grandma’s there again in her kitchen in Monterey Park, California, my grandpa and uncles playing backgammon in the living room, my aunts sneaking cigarettes in the bathroom, and we cousins trying our best to make the youngest ones cry? It’s simply because Grandma worked while we played. And she hugged us, her Bala Jons, as often as possible and kept cooking (I haven’t even mentioned her dolma, her lahmajun, or Gata, her Armenian cake).
Now I realize it’s partly the real pleasure she took in her cooking that made her rice so perfect, her roast so delectable (you knew that already, didn’t you?). But more than that: When I look back I realize the times my rice has turned out to be so good have been those meals where I’ve done nearly all the work myself and done it without thinking it was a chore. Sort of like the phone that doesn’t ring when it’s watched, the rice doesn’t perform when it’s worried over. It does its tricks when the cook’s so busy cutting the vegetables, chilling the cokes and smooching the babies that she (or he) just lets it alone to do its work.
Garnish the rice with chopped dates and browned, slivered almonds.
Dates and almonds are considered required toppings on the pilaf for any holiday dinner, but we seldom add them to the dish for daily meals. The purists in my family use only good quality California pitted dates from Hadley’s Markets in Southern California, but it’s much easier to use the already chopped and barely sugared Dromedary brand dates.
The slivered almonds must be browned, usually in butter on top of the stove. You can brown them in the toaster oven without any butter at all. It works. Because there’s already so much butter in the rice, you won’t miss it in the almonds. However, and this is critical, if cousin Larry comes to dinner, be sure to serve the dates and almonds separately from the pilaf, a bowl for the dates, another for the slivered almonds. If Larry doesn’t come, combine them and layer the mixture on top of the pilaf that you’ve already poured onto a platter. (I suggest a heavy ironstone oblong platter.)
Sometimes a layer of rice gets crispy and sticks to the bottom of the pan. Just leave that in the pan when you serve the pilaf. When this happens, it would be a good time to do the dishes yourself (Susan will be unavailable, probably in the corner of the living room telling jokes to Larry). Scrape off the crunchy butter-soaked rice with a wooden spatula, stand over the sink and eat it right off the spatula. It’s nearly as good as the juicy bread fresh from the shishes.