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Baked Stuffed Peppers
Cut green peppers in two lengthwise.
Remove the seeds and let the peppers soak in cold water for half an hour. Dry them and fill with a stuffing made of bread crumbs, chopped meat and seasoning-pepper, salt, sage and onion juice to taste. Place them in a pan and bake until brown on top. Add a little soup stock or melted butter and hot water before placing in the oven. Serve hot with fish or meat.
A frugal Victorian-era stuffed pepper with no quantities given at all, so treat it as a method rather than a formula. The one thing to settle before you start is whether your chopped meat is already cooked.
- The meat is meant to be leftoversThe meat may well be leftovers -- "chopped meat" in books of this period often means cooked meat from a previous meal, minced fine, though the recipe does not say. Since the peppers only bake until browned on top, raw ground meat will not reliably reach a safe 165F in that time. Use cooked meat, or brown raw meat fully in a skillet first.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake at 375F for 30 to 40 minutes, which browns the top and softens the pepper walls without collapsing them.
- Why the peppers soakThe recipe does not say what the half-hour soak is for; freshening or softening the bite of the pepper is the usual explanation. In practice it does little with modern bell peppers; a 3-minute parboil is more useful, as it guarantees tender halves rather than crisp ones.
- Onion juiceThis meant grated onion pressed through a cloth, used where a cook wanted onion flavour without visible pieces. A tablespoon of very finely grated onion, or a quarter of a small onion sweated in butter, does the same job.
- The liquid in the panThe stock or butter-and-water goes in the pan, not the stuffing. It steams the peppers from below and keeps the bottoms from scorching; about a quarter inch is enough, and it should be topped up if it dries before the peppers are done.
- Working proportionsFor six halves, figure roughly 1 cup soft bread crumbs to 1 cup chopped cooked meat, bound with an egg or a few spoons of stock. Sage is assertive here; a quarter teaspoon dried is plenty.
- Yield and servingThree peppers cut lengthwise give six halves, serving three as a side dish. The instruction to serve it with fish or meat marks this as a vegetable course, not a main.
Stuffed peppers appear in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward, and this version fits a familiar pattern: using up cooked meat in a form respectable enough to bring to the table. The bread crumb and minced meat filling, seasoned with sage and onion, closely resembles the poultry stuffing of the same period, which may account for sage rather than any Mediterranean herb being the flavouring here. Halving the peppers lengthwise rather than standing them upright, as is more common now, spreads a small amount of filling further. That the recipe positions the dish as an accompaniment to fish or meat, rather than a meal in itself, is a useful reminder that the American stuffed pepper as a main course, with rice and tomato and enough meat to stand alone, is a later development.