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Stuffed Pepper Salad
6 green peppers. 4 Neufchatel cheeses. 1 can pimento. Remove seeds and veins from pepper. Mash and season cheese with salt, pepper and a little cream. Line peppers with pimento and stuff with cheese. Set on ice until chilled. With a sharp knife slice the peppers into rings. Serve two or three rings on lettuce leaf with French dressing.
A cold pinwheel salad that depends entirely on the cheese setting firm enough to cut cleanly. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: pack tight, chill hardAny air pocket in the cheese becomes a hole that makes the ring fall apart under the knife. Press the cheese in with the back of a spoon or a piping bag, wrap each pepper in plastic, and chill at least 4 hours or overnight until the filling is genuinely firm.
- "4 Neufchatel cheeses"These were small individual cheeses, probably in the region of 3 ounces each, so somewhere around 12 ounces in total. Two 8-ounce blocks of Neufchâtel or cream cheese will more than cover it; American Neufchâtel is a lower-fat cream cheese and behaves much the same way, though it is a little softer and wetter.
- "1 can pimento"Canned pimentos were whole skinned sweet red peppers, sold in small cans; the recipe does not say what size, and a small can of 4 to 7 ounces is the likely intent. Jarred roasted red peppers or piquillos do the job. Drain and blot them dry on paper towels, or the moisture will loosen the cheese from the pepper wall.
- Green peppersChoose straight, evenly wide bell peppers rather than tapered ones so the rings come out the same size. Cut the tops off cleanly and hollow them without splitting the sides.
- "A little cream"A tablespoon or two is enough to make the cheese spreadable. More than that and it will not hold a slice. Season assertively, since cold blunts salt.
- SlicingUse a thin sharp knife, wipe it between cuts, and go about a half inch thick. A serrated knife tears the pepper wall and drags the filling.
- YieldSix peppers give roughly 30 to 36 rings, so around 12 servings at two or three rings each. French dressing of this period was generally little more than oil, vinegar and salt, sometimes with paprika, shaken cold; a sharp vinaigrette suits the richness.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson's New Cook Book comes out of the Philadelphia domestic-science tradition of the late 1910s and early 1920s, and this salad is a period piece in miniature. The salad course had become the place where American cooks demonstrated neatness and novelty, and the stuffed-and-sliced cheese pepper — chilled solid, cut into pinwheels, laid on a lettuce leaf — belongs to the same impulse as the moulded gelatine salad: food arranged to show a pattern. The pimento inside is a good marker of date. Sweet Spanish pimiento peppers were established as a commercial canned crop in Georgia in the first decades of the twentieth century, and by the 1920s a cheap can of them was a pantry staple used chiefly for color, as it is here. The cheese is the American version of Neufchâtel, which the recipe counts by the cheese rather than by the ounce — presumably because it was then sold in small individual cakes rather than in blocks, though that is supposition.