Pepper Pot
Take fish flesh, and chicken or other fowl, as nearly equal parts as possıble. Add to this one pound of beef or mutton cut in very small pieces. Put into a soup pot; cover with sufficient quantity of water; add a red pepper, boiling the whole until tender. Skim the liquid, and if not sufficient in quantity, add boiling water. Then add one large onion, sliced; salt to taste. Sliced potatoes and small dumplings made of flour and butter. Boil until the ingredients are all tender. Serve hot.
An unusually loose pepper pot: no quantities for the fish or fowl, no cooking times, and dumplings described in three words. Read it as a method rather than a formula.
- Scale itThe "equal parts" instruction applies to the fish and fowl; the pound of beef or mutton is specified separately. Taking that pound as the anchor and using about a pound each of fish and chicken gives a potful that should feed six to eight. With that much water the result will be a brothy soup rather than a stew.
- Add the fish lastThe recipe boils everything together until tender, which will disintegrate any fish worth eating. Simmer the beef and chicken until they are tender, then add firm white fish in chunks for the final five to eight minutes.
- "A red pepper"Most likely a single whole red pepper pod, dried or fresh, added to the pot and later fished out or left in. Heat varies enormously between varieties; start with one and taste rather than assuming a cayenne-level burn.
- Simmering, not boiling"boiling the whole until tender" in period usage generally covers a steady simmer. A hard boil will shred the chicken and cloud the broth; hold it at a bare tremble until the beef is tender, which for the very small pieces the recipe calls for will take considerably less time than a large cut.
- The dumplingsFlour and butter alone will not bind. Rub about 2 oz butter into 8 oz flour with half a teaspoon salt, then bring it together with cold water to a stiff dough, roll into small balls, and drop them in for the last 15 minutes with the lid on.
- SkimmingSkim in the first twenty minutes, while the grey protein foam is still rising and before it breaks up into the broth. Fat can be lifted off at the end with a spoon or by chilling.
- PotatoesWaxy potatoes hold their slices; floury ones will thicken the soup as they collapse, which some cooks want in a pepper pot. Add them about 25 minutes before serving.
Pepper pot is a name that travelled. In the West Indies it belongs to a long-simmered meat stew kept going for days and seasoned with cassareep and hot pepper; in Philadelphia it came to mean a peppery tripe soup, wrapped in a much-repeated but undocumented story about Washington's army at Valley Forge. This version is a third thing again: whatever protein the household had, put into one pot with a hot pepper pod and dumplings. The instruction to use fish and fowl in "as nearly equal parts as possible" is the tell: this is a recipe organised around what a cook happened to have rather than around a fixed dish, which is why it gives quantities for only one of its three meats. Flour-and-butter dumplings are dropped straight into the broth, stretching a thin soup into a meal without another trip to the market.