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Green Peppers Stuffed
6 peppers Bread crumbs 2 teaspoons salt 1 tablespoon herbs 1/4 teaspoon basil 14 1/4 1/4 teaspoon summer savory 2 tablespoons butter or drippings 1 cup white sauce 2 cups white stock or water Select only tender, sweet peppers. Soak in water bread crumbs sufficient to make one pint when the water is pressed out; mix with the seasonings and butter. Cut off the stem end of each pepper; carefully remove the interior and fill the peppers with the prepared dressing. Place in a shallow baking pan and pour around them the white sauce thinned with the stock or water. Bake about one hour, basting frequently with the sauce. Peppers may also be filled with a well-seasoned dressing of chopped meat, with or without the addition of bread crumbs or boiled rice.
A meatless stuffed pepper from an era when bread, butter and a little herb were considered dressing enough. The method is essentially a braise: the peppers sit in thinned white sauce and are basted as they soften.
- The hinge: keep the sauce looseOne cup of white sauce let down with two cups of stock is deliberately thin, because it reduces over the long bake and is used for basting. If it thickens to a paste before the hour is up, add more stock rather than letting it scorch around the peppers.
- Bread crumbs, soakedThese are soft crumbs from a stale loaf, not dry packaged crumbs. Soak in cold water, then squeeze hard: the recipe's measure is one pint of damp crumb after pressing, so start with enough bread to leave that much and judge by volume rather than weight.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. 350F suits the hour-long bake with basting. Cover loosely with foil for the first 40 minutes if the tops brown before the peppers give way.
- Herb quantitiesA tablespoon of mixed dried herbs plus basil and summer savory is a lot for a pint of crumbs by modern taste; halve it if you prefer. Fresh herbs can be used at roughly three times the dried amount.
- Summer savoryStill sold, though less common than it was; it is peppery and slightly thyme-like. Thyme with a pinch of marjoram is the nearest substitute.
- DrippingsThe recipe allows butter or drippings; beef or bacon drippings give the stuffing considerable savour. Butter works, but with no meat in the dish the drippings are doing real work.
- TimingAn hour at 350F leaves the peppers thoroughly collapsed and sweet, which is the intended texture here. If you prefer them holding shape, 35 to 40 minutes is enough.
- YieldSix peppers serve six as a side or three as a main course. The meat variation at the end needs the filling fully cooked through; take stuffed peppers containing raw ground meat to 165F at the centre.
Sweet peppers were a comparatively late arrival in mainstream American home cooking, moving from kitchen gardens and immigrant tables into general cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, which may be why a book of this vintage feels obliged to say "select only tender, sweet peppers." The filling here is a bread dressing of exactly the kind used for poultry, which suggests one way the dish may have been understood: as an application of familiar stuffing to a new vessel. Summer savory in the seasoning is another marker of the period; it was a standard kitchen-garden herb in nineteenth-century America, grouped with sage and thyme in the "sweet herbs" that flavoured dressings, and it has faded from general use since.