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Stuffed Green Peppers
6 large green peppers, 1 pint boiled rice, 1 tomato, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 medium-sized onion, and 1 teaspoon salt. Cut the tops from peppers and remove seeds. Add to rice the onion and tomato, chopped and salt. Wash peppers, stuff them with boiled rice, put on tops and stand them in a baking pan. Cover bottom of baking pan with a little water; add to it the Crisco. Bake in a quick oven 20 minutes, basting 2 or 3 times.
A meatless stuffed pepper from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks, and about as plain as the genre gets. Two things need attention: the oven is hotter than most modern stuffed-pepper recipes call for, and the filling goes in with everything raw except the rice.
- Quick ovenRead this as roughly 400-425F. At that heat the peppers should blister and soften within the stated 20 minutes; at 350F they are likely to still be firm and the onion still sharp.
- A pint of boiled riceA pint is 2 cups, measured after cooking, which is roughly 2/3 cup of raw long-grain rice. That fills six large peppers loosely, which is what you want since the rice will not expand further.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, still on shelves but reformulated in the mid-2000s to cut trans fat to under a gram per serving. Its only job here is to enrich the basting liquid, so a tablespoon of oil or butter does the same work.
- The raw onionOne chopped onion stirred cold into rice and baked 20 minutes stays assertive and slightly crisp. Softening it in the tablespoon of fat first, then adding it to the rice, gives a rounder filling; the pan water alone can carry the basting.
- Basting a stuffed pepperThe point of the water and fat in the pan is to steam the pepper walls from below while the tops brown. Keep about 1/4 inch of liquid in the pan and top it up if it cooks dry, or the bottoms scorch before the peppers give.
- Keeping them uprightLarge peppers tip over and spill. Trim the base flat, or stand them in a deep dish or muffin tin so they support each other.
- SeasoningOne teaspoon of salt and a single tomato is the whole seasoning, and it tastes of its period. Pepper, garlic, a handful of grated cheese or chopped parsley are all within the spirit of the dish.
- YieldSix peppers, one apiece as a light supper or lunch dish. As written it is a side or a meatless main, not a substantial dinner course.
This recipe comes from one of the Crisco cookbooks Marion Harris Neil wrote for Procter & Gamble, which helps explain why a vegetable shortening turns up in a tablespoon quantity in a dish that barely needs fat at all: the books existed to show Crisco doing what lard and butter did. Stuffed peppers appear in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward, and have been linked both to Spanish and Mexican cooking in the Southwest and to Hungarian and Italian immigrant households in the East, though the routes are hard to disentangle. The rice-and-tomato filling here is the meatless, economical version of the idea.