"There’s something so attractive about a meal cooked in a single vessel. Ease aside, letting your ingredients come together in one place to sputter and simmer and seep into each other is the best way to bring every flavor right up to the edge of its companions. A purloo does just that. It unites, in one pot, rice, meat, spices, and vegetables, all covered with broth and stewed until soft. When Digby Stridiron, a chef from the Caribbean island of St. Croix, first encountered a South Carolina purloo, he knew it by another name:
“You start seeing these different names because they changed when they got here, but they’re all the same references. I grew up eating pelau, or cook-up rice, in the West Indies. Then you realize it came from Persia, where it was polow, then the French put their take on it and called it pilaf. It’s basically this rice that’s a one-pot meal, which back in the day was everything.”"