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Stuffed Peppers (For this use the sweet Spanish)
For this use the sweet Spanish peppers, and to each six allow a half pint of chopped cooked chicken, a half pint of stale bread crumbs, a level teaspoonful of salt and a salt spoonful of pepper, a tablespoonful of chopped parsley, two tablespoonfuls of butter.
Cut off the stem end of the peppers and remove the seeds. Throw them in a saucepan of boiling water and cover; stand on the back of the stove fifteen minutes. Mix all the ingredients together except the butter. Melt it and pour over after you have everything thoroughly mixed. Drain the peppers, fill with the stuffing, sprinkle the tops with bread crumbs. Put here and there bits of butter, stand in a baking-pan, and bake in a quick oven fifteen minutes. Serve with roasted beef.
A late-Victorian way of using up cold roast chicken, and it works as written provided you read the measures correctly and treat the peppers gently.
- Half a pintIn American measure a half pint is one cup. So one cup of chopped cooked chicken and one cup of stale breadcrumbs for six peppers, which makes a modest filling by current standards.
- A salt spoonfulThe saltspoon was the small spoon that came with a Victorian salt cellar, and period cookbooks generally equate a saltspoonful with about a quarter teaspoon. Here that means roughly 1/4 teaspoon of pepper.
- Sweet Spanish peppersOrdinary green or red bell peppers will do. Period seed lists did carry large mild sorts under 'Spanish' names, but here the word is mainly distinguishing the mild fruit from cayenne and other hot capsicums; there is nothing you need to hunt down.
- The parboilFifteen minutes covered on the back of the stove means fifteen minutes off direct heat in water that is no longer boiling hard. Peppers held at a full boil that long collapse; five to eight minutes at a bare simmer gives the same softening without losing the shape.
- A quick ovenUsually reckoned at about 400-425F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is enough only because everything in the pepper is already cooked and the pepper itself is blanched. The bake is for browning the crumb top, nothing more.
- Moisten the stuffingCooked chicken, dry crumbs and melted butter with no liquid gives a filling that eats dry. A few tablespoons of stock or the pan juices from the roast beef the dish is meant to accompany bring it together without altering the character.
- Stale bread crumbsThese are dry crumbs from day-old bread, coarser than commercial fine crumbs. Grate or pulse your own; packaged crumbs pack tighter and soak up more of the butter.
- YieldSix stuffed peppers, served as a side to roast beef rather than as a main course. As a main, count on two per person and increase the filling accordingly.
Stuffed vegetables are old and widespread, but the stuffed sweet pepper is generally thought to arrive in Anglo-American home cookery late, following the spread of mild capsicum varieties through American market gardens in the second half of the nineteenth century. The instruction to specify "the sweet Spanish" may be a tell: it is tempting to read the qualifier as reassurance for a reader who could not be assumed to know that some peppers were mild, though that is a guess about the writer's intent rather than something the text proves. Note too what the recipe is for. It is a made dish built on a cup of already-cooked chicken, the kind of economical second-day cookery often associated with the domestic-science writing of the era, and it is positioned firmly as an accompaniment to roast beef rather than a dish in its own right. The habit of standing a covered pan "on the back of the stove" belongs to the coal or wood range, where the far side of the top plate held a steady low heat all day; a modern cook has to recreate that deliberately with a low burner."