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Stewed Peppers
Cut peppers in sections, remove seed, and boil in salted water one-half an hour. Take out, drain, put into saucepan 1/4 cupful of cream, season with salt, add 1 tablespoonful of butter, stir in peppers, and serve very hot on toast.
A simple creamed vegetable from the era when sweet peppers were still treated as something to be boiled into submission. The method works, but the timing needs adjusting.
- Cut the boiling timeHalf an hour in salted water reduces bell peppers to grey slack. Ten to twelve minutes gives tender pepper that still holds its shape and colour; taste at eight.
- Which peppers"Peppers" here means sweet bell peppers, most likely green ones, which were the common market pepper of the period. Red, yellow or orange work and are sweeter, though they soften faster.
- PeelingBoiled peppers shed their skins in translucent sheets that are unpleasant on the tongue. Slip them off after draining, or char and peel the peppers before cutting if you prefer the flavour.
- A quarter cupful of creamThat is 60 ml. Period recipes were not consistent about what "cream" meant, and it may have been thinner than modern heavy cream; heavy cream gives the richest result. Let it reduce a minute in the pan before the butter goes in so the sauce clings.
- Do not boil the sauce hardOnce the peppers are in the cream, keep it at a bare simmer. A rolling boil with only a quarter cup of liquid will break the butter out and leave the peppers sitting in oil.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of peppers; a quarter cupful of cream will coat enough peppers for a light dish for two, and can be scaled up.
- The toastA firm white bread, toasted dry, holds the sauce best. Creamed dishes served on toast were a common form at breakfast or a light lunch in this period.
Creamed vegetables on toast belong to a whole family of turn-of-the-century American dishes -- creamed mushrooms, creamed chipped beef, creamed eggs -- in which a small quantity of cream and butter turned an inexpensive ingredient into a hot dish substantial enough for a plate. Sweet peppers appear in American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s stuffed, pickled, or, as here, boiled and creamed, and long cooking times for vegetables were usual in the period. The instructions here are terse to the point of shorthand, assuming a reader already familiar with the pattern.