Pilau Period COrigin theory CVerified

Pilau is a dish of the Swahili coast of East Africa: rice cooked together with meat and spices. Rice takes the lead, joined by beef or goat and scented with cumin, cardamom, and cloves. Served at weddings and festivals as the rice offered to guests, it has long been rooted in the life of the Swahili towns.

From the eighth century onward, the Swahili coast became a meeting point of Indian Ocean trade, where Arab, Persian, and Indian merchants came and went on the monsoon winds, and Muslim settlement grew. Shirazi settlers are recorded arriving in the twelfth century. Swahili cooking is known as the distinctive food of these sea-facing port towns, and for Songo Mnara, a port town at the height of precolonial Swahili urbanism, a study has reconstructed the diet of the time in detail from fats absorbed into pottery and from plant and animal remains. From around the eleventh century, rice came to be grown as a leading local staple on Pemba, and with Islamization and growing ties to the Indian Ocean world it moved to the center of the table.

Cooking rice with spices ties pilau to the pilaf family of West Asian rice dishes. A group of rice dishes descended from the Persian polow spread with merchants and migrants, taking on the ingredients and habits of each place they reached and changing shape along the way. Swahili pilau puts the spices and meat in the same pot as the rice and cooks it until the grains have drunk up the liquid. Cloves, now famous as a Zanzibar product, originally came from the Moluccas; their cultivation on Zanzibar began around 1812 and spread widely only after 1828. The spices that reached Swahili kitchens before then were carried in by Indian Ocean trade.

A sister descended from the same polow is biryani of South Asia. Where biryani layers rice and filling and steams them, pilau cooks everything together in one pot. The two are close relatives that grew from a shared origin into different ways of cooking in different lands.

The history of pilau is often told by tying it to a single lineage: Persian, Indian, or Arab. The name goes back to the Persian word polow, and rice and spices reached the coast through trade with India and Arabia. Each of these clues can serve to name one land as the dish's home.

A nineteenth-century dictionary preserves a view that leans toward India. In the missionary Krapf's Swahili dictionary, published in 1882, the headword Pilao is glossed "pillaw, an Indian dish." At least Krapf himself took it for an Indian dish. Its entry in the dictionary shows only that the word existed in Swahili by 1882 at the latest; it cannot tell us the year or the place in which the dish came into being.

Against this stands the view that rice dishes of the polow line, which began in Persia, reached the Swahili coast on the Indian Ocean trade plied by Arab, Persian, and Indian merchants and took root there, so that pilau is a confluence of trade rather than the creation of any one people. Still, no record has yet been found that traces directly which lineage pilau's way of cooking came from. The dictionary line calling it an Indian dish and the picture of a trading confluence stand side by side, and nothing decisive has yet emerged to settle on any one lineage.