DISCOVER THE SECRET PATH TO A PIONEER PAST:
Thursday, March 13, 2003
Chicken, rice part of Florida history
NEWS-JOURNAL STAFF REPORT
"We pronounce the word 'pur-loo.' It is any dish of meat and rice cooked together," Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote in "Cross Creek Cookery," published in 1942. "No Florida church supper, no large rural gathering, is without it. It is blessed among dishes for such a purpose, or for a large family, for meat goes farther in a pilau than prepared in any other way."
Floridians have seen the wisdom in Rawlings' words for generations, even though residents of each area have their own way of cooking and flavoring Pilau.
New Smyrna beach's dominant Pilau recipe is seasoned with datil and bell peppers, onion. tomatoes, allspice and chili powder, but different seasonings reign not far away, at Samsula's SNPJ Lodge. There, the current mistress of the Pilau pot is Mary Pleterski, and she says her version is seasoned with onion, celery, garlic, marjoram, thyme, curry and allspice.
She learned how to make the dish in the 1970s from Elsie Galbreath, now 91. Over the years, she's found the pot in which it's cooked, a former pressure cooker, to be almost as important as the ingredients. When she uses the lodge pot, which allows her to cook enough chicken Pilau to feed 125 people, she doesn't have to measure -- she can judge the amount of broth by the level it reaches in the pot.
"Elsie cooked the Pilau for when my husband and I got married," Pleterski said. "She cooked the Pilau in that same pot." Pleterski has been married 45 years and used the same pot to make Pilau for her daughter's wedding.
The dish is expected at weddings, anniversary parties, lodge dinners and wakes, and Pleterski has supervised its making for more than 30 years now.
Because of the Slovenian heritage of many of Samsula's pioneer families, it would be easy to believe the favored seasonings somehow derive from Slovene traditions, but Pleterski knows of no other traditional foods that mimic Pilau's flavor profile.
The seasoning for one of Floridas most famous Pilaus, that at the Coon Bottom Pilau Dinner, the second Thursday of November for 43 years now, is the simplest yet. It's just salt and pepper, said Shirley Vickers, who has lived near Coon Bottom, also known as Concord, north of Tallahassee near the Georgia border, for 50 years now.
"Cooking it outside is what makes it so good," she said by phone from her home in Havana, Fla. Her husband aids each year in cooking enough Pilau in black washpots over an open fire to feed 4,000 to 5,000 people.
