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"I am afraid," said I, "that you do not find all this as Oriental as you expected, Miss Dabstreak." "Ah, no!" she sighed. "If by 'this' you mean the hotel, it is European, and unpleasantly so at that." "I think it is a very good hotel; and this rice what do you call it? is very good, too," said John Carvel, who was tasting pilaff for the first time.
I had slept there many a night in former times, and I loved his simple hospitality. "You are the same as ever," I said. "A man cannot put his nose inside your door without being caught, as you call it." "Many a man may," he answered. "But not you, my dear fellow. Now you will have coffee and a cigarette. We will dine at home. There is pilaff and kebabi and a bottle of champagne. How are you?
Still oftener, however, they are boiled, and their juices eaten in a kind of pottage with millet in it, being the same as the Sclavonian and Polish cachat, the use of which extends as far west as the Adriatic, while on the southern side of the Caucasus, even to Central Asia, the pilaff is made with rice.
Soup, of course, came first, then fish, then meat stewed with potatoes and onions, then other meat with ochra and tomatoes, then boiled chicken, which is eaten with a pilaff of rice colored with saffron, then delicious sweet potatoes, yams, plantains, and vegetables of every sort, then a kind of pepper, brought, we think, from the East Indies, and intensely tropical in its taste, then a splendid roast turkey, and ham strewed with small colored sugar-plums, then well, is not that enough for one person to have eaten at a stretch, and that person accustomed to a Boston diet?
The fare consisted mostly of varieties of fowl, with a pilaff of rice, in the Turkish manner, all decidedly good; but the wine rather sweet and muddy. When I asked for a glass of water, it was handed me in a little bowl of silver, which mine hostess had just dashed into a jar of filtered lymph.
On this particular evening Logotheti dined at home alone, chiefly on a very simple Greek pilaff, Turkish preserved rose leaves and cream cheese, which might strike a Parisian as strange fare, unless he were a gourmet of the very highest order.
Before sundown, however, we were comfortably installed in the house of the head-man of the place, who spread carpets of soft texture and quaint design in our honour, regaled us with an excellent "pilaff," and produced a flask of Persian wine. The latter would hardly have passed muster in Europe.
There were the picket-ropes, a smouldering fire, a kalyan, and the remains of a pilaff on the ground, but no men. The firing had done it. One and all had turned tail and fled. The position was not pleasant, for V was naturally absolutely ignorant of the road. 'They will come back, he thought, and patiently waited.
But mutton and onions and pilaff are the staple of their consumption. They eat jams of all sorts. Sometimes soup is brought in in a huge bowl, and put down in the middle of the table. Then each one dips in his spoon in the order of precedence, and eats as much as he can. They will give you a dozen courses in half an hour, and they never speak at their meals if they can help it."
After their audience, they dined with the minister, not exactly in the manner of Downing Street, nor even with the comparative luxury of Canobia; but the meal was an incident, and therefore agreeable. A good pilaff was more acceptable than some partridges dressed with oil and honey: but all Easterns are temperate, and travel teaches abstinence to the Franks.