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Stuffed Green Peppers
¼ lb. Kraft Amer. cheese 6 green peppers Rub thru grater 1½ C fine bread crumbs Edna F. Doerschuk. 1 T grated onion 2 T butter Salt & pepper to taste Cut off thin slice of stem end of peppers, remove seeds. Parboil peppers two minutes, drain, and fill with mixture. Cover tops with two minutes, drain, and fill with mixture. Cover tops with cheese. Add a little milk to mixture . Bake in milk about twenty minutes.
Blanche Osborne.
The transcription has run two contributors' cards together and scrambled a line or two, but the dish underneath is clear: peppers stuffed with a buttered crumb-and-cheese mixture, baked in a shallow pool of milk. A few readings need settling before you start.
- The cheese quantityThe printed page gives ¼ lb. of cheese, as our text now reads. That is four ounces, about a cup once grated, which is enough to top six peppers.
- Kraft American cheeseIn this period the name meant a firm loaf of processed cheese that could actually be grated, not the plastic-wrapped slices sold now. Use a block of mild processed cheese, or a mild cheddar, which grates and melts much the same way.
- Duplicated lineThe fragment "two minutes, drain, and fill with mixture. Cover tops with" is set twice. Parboil, fill, and cover the tops with cheese once each.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven — 350F — for twenty minutes browns the crumb tops without collapsing the peppers.
- "Bake in milk"Most likely means standing the filled peppers upright in a baking dish with milk poured in around them. The depth is not specified; enough to cover the base of the dish keeps the pepper walls steaming from below while the top crisps.
- A little milk to the mixtureAdd just enough to bind the crumbs into a moist, loose stuffing that holds together when pressed — a few tablespoons. Wet crumbs bake to paste.
- ParboilingTwo minutes in boiling water is what the recipe calls for. If your peppers are thick-walled, three to four minutes helps, and they should be drained upside down so no water sits inside.
- YieldSix peppers, one each, as a light supper or a side to roast meat.
Community cookbooks were assembled by pasting or typing up whatever cards members handed in, which is why this page carries two names — Edna F. Doerschuk and Blanche Osborne — and one recipe. Stuffed peppers became a staple of American home cooking once bell peppers were widely available in markets from the late nineteenth century onward, and the meatless crumb-and-cheese version, rather than the ground-beef one familiar today, turns up often in such collections: cheap, filling, suitable for Lent and for the vegetable chapter. Kraft's processed loaf cheese was heavily advertised to housewives as reliable and uniform, and cooks wrote the brand into their recipes as a specification, the way one might now write "instant yeast."