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Stuffed Peppers (Cut the tops from eight red)
Cut the tops from eight red or green peppers; remove seeds; cover with boiling water; leave standing five minutes. Fill with any of the following stuffings. Cover with buttered bread crumbs, arrange in baking dish, and bake one half hour.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in early 1900s books: it assumes you know what temperature to use, what a stuffing is, and that the stuffing arrives already cooked. Fill in those three gaps and it works exactly as written.
- Which peppers"Red or green peppers" here means sweet bell peppers, which in books of this period were sold and listed simply as peppers. Nothing hot is intended; if you want heat, it comes from the stuffing.
- The five-minute soakPouring boiling water over the hollowed shells and letting them stand is a gentle blanch, not a boil. It softens the flesh just enough to finish in the oven without collapsing. Drain them upside down before filling so the stuffing does not go watery.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, for the half hour stated should heat the filling through and brown the crumbs; much hotter and the crumbs are likely to darken before the peppers soften.
- The stuffing must be cooked firstThis is the hinge. Half an hour in a moderate oven inside a pepper will not cook raw ground meat or raw rice to safety or tenderness. The instruction to "fill with any of the following stuffings" points to already-made, seasoned mixtures; treat the baking as reheating and browning only.
- Buttered crumbsDry bread crumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly a tablespoon of butter to a quarter cup of crumbs. Panko works but browns faster; check at twenty minutes.
- Keeping them uprightChoose a dish that holds the eight peppers snugly, or set them in a muffin tin. A quarter inch of water or stock in the dish keeps the bottoms from drying and scorching.
- YieldEight peppers, one or two per person depending on the stuffing and what else is on the table, so four to eight servings.
Stuffed peppers turn up in American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward, part of a broad late-Victorian enthusiasm for vegetables used as edible containers alongside stuffed tomatoes, stuffed onions and stuffed cucumbers. The technique suited the era's kitchens: it gave a cook a respectable-looking entree built from yesterday's cooked meat, rice or macaroni, at a moment when "entree" still meant a small made dish served between heavier courses rather than the main plate. Sweet peppers themselves are often said to have been a comparatively recent everyday grocery in the Northeast. That this recipe supplies no stuffing at all, only a pointer to "any of the following stuffings," tells you what the book expected of its reader: the shell and the buttered crumbs were the lesson, and the filling was whatever the larder held.