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Stuffed Peppers
6 green peppers. 2 cups minced cold meat, chicken or veal. 1 cup bread crumbs. 1 small onion. 1 tablespoon melted butter. 1 cup stock or water. Salt and pepper. 1 cup tomato sauce. Ham, ground.
Cut tops from peppers. With scissors cut out lining and seeds. Stand in cold water one-half hour. Drain, fill with any cold meat mined fine, a little onion, butter, pepper and salt and a few bread crumbs. Put in baking dish with cup of stock or water and bake one-half hour or more. Serve hot with tomato sauce.
CABBAGE AND SAUSAGE (CREAM SAUCE). 1/2 head white cabbage. 1/2 lb. sausage. 1 pt. milk. 1/2 pod red pepper. 1 tablespoon butter. 1 tablespoon flour. 1 small cup bread crumbs. Cut cabbage fine, let stand in cold water one-half hour. Put in boiling water and drain after boiling fifteen minutes. Add more water and cook ten minutes. Drain, add rounds of sausage fried. Put in baking dish and bake until seasoned. It may be served in the outer leaves of whole cabbage after being steamed.
Two dishes run together on one page, both written in the telegraphic style Mrs. Wilson used for wartime and post-war economy cooking. Both ingredient lists name things the instructions then forget, so read the list and the method against each other before you start.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given anywhere in the recipe. Bake the peppers in a moderate oven, around 350F, for the half hour or more specified; the filling is cold cooked meat, so you are mainly heating through and softening the shells.
- The unused ham"Ham, ground" appears in the list and never in the method. The likeliest reading is a seasoning addition to the mince; two or three tablespoons folded into the two cups of meat is a reasonable amount. Salt lightly if you use it.
- The missing cream sauceThe cabbage dish is titled "cream sauce" and lists a pint of milk, a tablespoon each of butter and flour, and bread crumbs, none of which the instructions use. Make a white sauce from the butter, flour and milk, combine it with the drained cabbage and fried sausage in the baking dish, and top with the crumbs.
- Cold cooked meatThe pepper filling is built from leftovers — roast chicken, veal, or any cold joint, minced fine rather than shredded. Two cups is roughly 10 to 12 ounces of picked meat. If you are starting from raw, cook it first; the half-hour bake will not do it.
- Soaking the peppersThe half hour in cold water is a common instruction in recipes of this period; the book does not say what it is for. It does no harm, but blanching the hollowed peppers two or three minutes in boiling water gives a more evenly tender result in the same bake time.
- Half a pod of red pepperThis means a dried hot pod, not a bell pepper. Half a pod is potent; a pinch of crushed red pepper or a quarter teaspoon of cayenne is a reasonable stand-in, added to the sauce.
- Cabbage timingFifteen minutes boiling, a change of water, then ten more will reduce the cabbage to near-purée by modern taste, and it will smell strongly. Eight to ten minutes in one pot of salted water is enough to make it tender for the bake.
- Sausage"Rounds of sausage fried" means links sliced into coins and browned in a pan. Brown them through, not just on the surface, since the later baking is short and the cream sauce insulates them.
- YieldThe peppers serve six as a light main course or a substantial side. The cabbage serves four.
Stuffed peppers of this kind belong to the American economy tradition rather than to any one national cuisine: a vegetable shell used as a container for the previous day's roast, so that two cups of cold chicken or veal stretch to feed six. If the source is Mrs. Wilson's, the arithmetic is characteristic of her — she wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and worked with the U.S. Food Administration during the First World War, and her books are full of dishes whose real subject is the leftover. Green peppers were a summer and early-autumn vegetable in her day, cheap in season and scarce the rest of the year. The cabbage and sausage that follows works the same way from the opposite direction — a small amount of meat carried by a large amount of cheap vegetable, dressed in a flour-and-milk sauce that was a standard binding of the period for anything destined to be baked and browned.