Pilaf and similar dishes are common to Balkan, Middle Eastern, Eastern Europe, South Caucasian, Central and South Asian, East African, Latin American, and Caribbean cuisines. It is a staple food and a popular dish in Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Israel, Crete, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Romania, Russia, Kurdistan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Pakistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Uganda, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Xinjiang, and Uzbekistan.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition (2006) the English word pilaf, which is the later and North American English form of spelling the word pilau, is a borrowing from Turkish, its etymon, or linguistic ancestor, the Turkish pilav, whose etymon is the Persian pilāv; "pilaf" is found more commonly in North American dictionaries than pilau.The British and Commonwealth English spelling, pilau, has etymon Persian pulaw (in form palāv, pilāv, or pulāv in the 16th century ), whose line of descent is: Hindi pulāv ( dish of rice and meat ), Sanskrit pulāka ( ball of rice), which in turn is probably of Dravidian descent (in the modern Dravidian language Tamil puḷukku means (adjective) simmered, ( noun ) boiled or parboiled food, puḷukkal cooked rice ).
Although the cultivation of rice had spread much earlier from South Asia to Central and West Asia, it was at the time of the Abbasid Caliphate that methods of cooking rice which approximate modern styles of cooking the pilaf at first spread through a vast territory from Spain to Afghanistan, and eventually to a wider world. The Spanish paella, and the South Asian pilau or pulao, and biryani, evolved from such dishes.
According to author K. T. Achaya, the Indian epic Mahabharata mentions an instance of rice and meat cooked together. Also, according to Achaya, "pulao" or "pallao" is used to refer to a rice dish in ancient Sanskrit works such as the Yājñavalkya Smṛti. However, according to other authors, these references do not substantially correlate to the commonly used meaning and history implied in pilafs, which appear in Indian accounts after the medieval Central Asian Muslim invasions of India.Similarly Alexander the Great and his army have been reported to be so impressed with Bactrian and Sogdian pilavs that his soldiers brought the recipes back to Macedonia when they returned.
