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Chicken Stuffing for Peppers
Chicken Stuffing, prepared in the same way as Tomato Stuffing, substituting chicken for tomato.
Rice or Macaroni Stuffing for Peppers Cook one cup rice or macaroni in chicken stock until tender; add one fourth cup onion finely chopped, two tablespoons red pepper finely chopped, two tablespoons melted butter, four tablespoons finely chopped mushrooms. Season with salt and pepper. In filling add more chicken stock or hot water if necessary.
Two related fillings for stuffed peppers, written in the telegraphic style of a book that expects you to have read the preceding page. Neither is a dish on its own; both assume you know what to do with a hollowed pepper.
- The missing cross-referenceThe chicken version simply points back to the book's Tomato Stuffing, swapping cooked, finely chopped chicken for the tomato. Without that earlier formula you have no quantities at all, so the two have to be read together.
- "Red pepper" is the vegetableTwo tablespoons of finely chopped red pepper means sweet red bell or pimiento flesh, not cayenne. Two tablespoons of ground cayenne would be inedible.
- Rice or macaroni quantitiesOne cup of raw rice cooked in stock swells to roughly three cups, enough to fill six to eight medium peppers. One cup of dry macaroni yields rather less, about two cups cooked; scale up if you are filling more than four or five.
- Cooking the starchRice can absorb the stock outright, pilaf fashion, at about twice its volume in liquid. Macaroni should be boiled loose in a larger quantity of stock and drained, or it turns to paste. Either way the grain wants to be just tender, since it will soften further in the oven.
- The onion and mushroomsThe recipe adds both raw to the cooked starch. Sweating them in the melted butter first for four or five minutes gives a far better filling; raw onion in a short bake stays sharp and raw mushrooms give up water into the pepper.
- Cooked chicken onlyFor the chicken version use meat already poached or roasted and cut small. There is no cooking step here long enough to bring raw chicken to a safe temperature inside a stuffed pepper.
- Baking the peppersThe recipe stops at the filling and never says how to bake. Since the filling is already cooked, a modern bake need only soften the pepper and brown the top: on the order of 30 to 35 minutes at 375F, in a dish with a little stock or water in the bottom. Blanching the hollowed peppers two or three minutes first shortens that considerably.
- Keeping it moistThe instruction to add more stock or hot water when filling is the one that matters. Rice and macaroni both drink liquid in the oven, and an underhydrated filling bakes dry and chalky.
Stuffed peppers arrive in American cookbooks in force around the turn of the twentieth century, a rise often connected to the wider availability of sweet bell peppers and to the fashion for small, composed, individually portioned dishes at middle-class dinners, though the causes are a matter of inference rather than record. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston in 1907 and compiled by Maria Willett Howard, was a chocolate manufacturer's promotional volume that ran well past its confectionery brief into a full general cookbook, which is why a recipe like this one reads as thriftily as it does. Both stuffings here are built on the same domestic logic: leftover cooked chicken, or a cup of rice or macaroni, extended with stock and mushrooms into something that could be sent to table as a course in its own right.