Cut off the tops and remove the seeds from large sweet peppers. Stuff with chopped raw beef highly seasoned, and mix with chopped onion, parsley, tomato, a beaten egg and 2 tablespoonfuls of chutney. Put the stuffed peppers in a baking-pan with a little hot water; sprinkle with bits of butter and let bake three-quarters of an hour. Serve. Garnish with cucumber salad.
A daily-calendar recipe written in the telegraphic style of its era: no quantities, no oven temperature, no yield. The proportions are yours to set, but the filling behaves like any raw-meat stuffing and wants to be judged by temperature rather than by the clock.
- The instruction that mattersThe beef goes in raw, so the peppers are done when the centre of the stuffing reaches 160F, not simply when the skins slump. Forty-five minutes suits four or five medium peppers packed loosely; densely stuffed large ones take longer.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 350F to 375F, which keeps the water in the pan simmering and steams the peppers while the tops brown.
- Working quantitiesFor four large bell peppers: about 1 lb ground beef, one small onion, a small tomato, a handful of parsley, one egg and the 2 tablespoons of chutney. The egg is a binder, not an enrichment; one is enough for a pound of meat.
- "Highly seasoned"Read this as salt and black pepper, possibly with a little cayenne or allspice. Season the raw mixture assertively; peppers and the water in the pan both dilute it. Fry a teaspoon of the filling to taste before stuffing.
- ChutneyMost likely a sweet-sour bottled mango chutney of the common sort, and it contributes a good deal of the sweetness and acidity here. Chop any large fruit pieces so the filling holds together.
- The pan of waterA quarter inch is plenty. It stops the pepper bottoms scorching and gives you pan juices; more than that and the peppers poach into shapelessness.
- Yield and servingOne large pepper per person as a main course with the cucumber salad, or half a pepper as a first course. The cut-off tops can be set back on for the first half hour, then removed to brown the filling.
This comes from the once-popular genre of the calendar cookbook, which assigned a dish to every day of the year and cast a wide net over "the nations" for variety. Stuffed vegetables of exactly this kind, mahshi, are a genuine staple of Egyptian and wider eastern Mediterranean cooking, though the domestic versions lean on rice, minced lamb, mint and a tomato-based sauce rather than on beef and bottled chutney. The chutney is the tell: it is Anglo-Indian, a standard item in British and American larders, and its presence here suggests how loosely "Egyptian" could function as a label, with a single unfamiliar condiment or spice seemingly enough to name a dish for a country. Serving it with cucumber salad is a period touch as well, cucumber being the reliable summer salad of an August menu.