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Stuffed Peppers
To prepare red and green sweet peppers for stuffing, cut off the top and with a knife cut out and remove the veins and seeds. The peppers may be filled with a variety of mixtures-chopped cold meats and seasoned bread crumbs and onion juice, or other seasoning, or plain boiled rice; in any or all cases moisten liberally with melted butter. Stand close together in a dish; pour on a little stock or boiling water and bake in the cooker for one half hour.
A skeleton recipe from the fireless-cooker chapter, written for a device almost nobody now owns. The filling is left to the cook; the method is where the translation work lies.
- The hinge: everything must go in hotA fireless cooker adds no heat. It only holds what you put in, so the stuffing, the peppers and the stock all have to be at or near boiling when the lid goes down, and the radiant discs or soapstones have to be fully heated. Assembling this cold and expecting half an hour in an insulated box to cook it will leave you with warm, not cooked, food.
- In a conventional ovenStand the filled peppers close together in a baking dish, pour in about half an inch of hot stock, cover, and bake at 350F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the peppers are tender and the filling is hot through. Uncover for the last ten minutes if you want any browning.
- Cold cooked meat as fillingThe chopped-meat version is a leftovers dish, which means the filling is being reheated rather than cooked. It needs to reach 165F at the centre. This is exactly the point where the fireless cooker is least trustworthy and an oven or covered pan on the stove is better.
- "Plain boiled rice"Cooked rice, not raw; quite possibly from an earlier pot. Raw rice will not soften in half an hour with only the moisture in the dish.
- Onion juiceA period seasoning: grated onion pressed through a cloth or sieve for flavour without texture. A teaspoon of finely grated onion, or a little onion powder, does the same job.
- The butter is not optional"Moisten liberally with melted butter" is doing the work that egg, cheese or tomato would do in a modern stuffing. Without it a crumb or rice filling bakes dry and crumbly. Two to three tablespoons per four peppers is about right.
- PeppersThe sweet peppers of this period were often thinner-walled than today's blocky bell peppers. Thick modern peppers benefit from two or three minutes in boiling water before stuffing, or they stay squeaky in half an hour.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon one to two peppers per person, and about a cup of filling for every two medium peppers.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between roughly 1900 and the 1920s: an insulated box, a set of iron or soapstone discs heated on the range, and a promise that dinner would finish itself while the cook was elsewhere and the kitchen stayed cool. It appealed for the same reasons a slow cooker does now, with the crucial difference that the fireless cooker supplied no heat of its own, only insulation, so food had to go in hot. Stuffed peppers were a natural fit and a natural leftovers vehicle, which is why the recipe offers only loose suggestions for the filling -- cold meats, boiled rice, seasoned crumbs -- rather than a fixed one.