Good morning. Perloo (above) is a dish you’ll find all over the Lowcountry of South Carolina, a tomato-stained one-pot rice stew with roots in West Africa.
The dish is family to jambalaya, to biryani, to pilaf and paella. It would loan money to gumbo. You sometimes see it made with shrimp, with venison, with ham hocks. The chef Rodney Scott, whose recipe Eric Kim recently adapted for us, makes his with smoked chicken. (His wife makes it with pig tails.) I’ve got smoked turkey in the fridge, so that’s what I’ll use. Perloo is for improvisation. It rewards what you’ve got. “The dish can taste different depending on who makes it,” Eric wrote for The New York Times Magazine, “and that is part of its charm.”
Featured Recipe
Chicken Perloo
I love a recipe like that, a piece of sheet music that delivers a different sound, a different feeling, to whomever plays it, depending on taste, influence, experience, skill. My perloo isn’t Rodney Scott’s, nor Eric Kim’s, but mine. I hope you can make it yours this weekend.
Heading in another direction, but keeping up the theme, you should take a look at my no-recipe recipe for a speedy fish chowder. I made it last weekend and went way off book. I fried up some batons of bacon, drained off most of the fat, replaced it with butter, then sautéed sliced leeks until they were soft. I flamed those with a glass of dry sherry, then added diced potatoes, a bunch of thyme and the better part of two pints of fish stock; you could use water instead.
