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Stuffed Peppers
6 sweet green peppers 1 gill (1/2 cup) tomatoes 4 tablespoonfuls chopped I oz. (1 heaping tablespooncooked ham ful) butter 4 tablespoonfuls bread 1 slice chopped onion crumbs Salt and pepper 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley Water or stock Use peppers of uniform size. Cut a piece off the stem end, and remove the seeds and partitions. Drop them into boiling water and boil for ten minutes.
Mix together the ham, parsley, bread crumbs, tomatoes, onion, butter, salt and pepper, and stuff them into the peppers.
Cover with a few buttered bread crumbs, place in a buttered fireproof dish, pour in a little water or stock, and bake in a moderate oven for three-quarters of an hour.
A straightforward stuffed pepper from the era when "casserole" still meant the vessel rather than the dish. The measurements are British-inflected and the parboiling step is the one that decides the texture.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the recipe itself glosses. The recipe specifies only "tomatoes" by volume; canned chopped tomatoes, drained of their thinnest liquid, are a reasonable modern stand-in.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read as around 350F. Three-quarters of an hour suits peppers that have already been parboiled, though the onion in the filling goes in raw and needs the time.
- Parboil, but watch itTen minutes in boiling water is what the recipe asks. Modern bell peppers soften faster and can collapse; five to six minutes gives a pepper that still holds its shape after baking.
- An ounce of butterTwo level tablespoons in modern terms; the original's "heaping tablespoonful" accounts for the difference.
- Cooked hamAny firm cooked ham works; the four tablespoons chopped is roughly an ounce and a half. This is a leftovers recipe at heart, and cooked chicken or tongue substitutes without changing the method.
- The liquid in the dishOnly enough water or stock to film the bottom, a quarter-inch at most. It is there to keep the pepper bases from scorching, not to stew them, and too much will steam the crumb topping soft.
- SeasoningBread crumbs and tomato both dull salt. Taste the filling before it goes into the peppers — once stuffed and baked there is no correcting it.
- YieldSix peppers, one apiece as a light supper dish or a vegetable course alongside a roast.
Casserole and single-dish oven cookery grew in popularity in Britain and America in the first decades of the twentieth century, as fireproof earthenware and glass baking dishes became more widely affordable. Stuffed peppers suit that moment twice over: they use up small quantities of cooked meat, and they cook and come to table in the same vessel. Sweet peppers were less familiar in northern European kitchens of the period than in Mediterranean and Hungarian cooking. The filling — ham, crumbs, onion, parsley, a little tomato — is essentially a forcemeat, close to the mixtures used for veal birds or stuffed onions.