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Stuffed Pimentos
1 cup cold potatoes. 1 tablespoon hominy. A Little bacon, bread crumbs, onion juice, and Worcestershire sauce.
Mix altogether and stuff pimentoes.
A skeleton recipe of the kind Mrs. Wilson used to fill out a chapter: it assumes you have leftovers on hand and know what to do with a stuffed pepper. The quantities beyond the first two lines are left entirely to the cook.
- What a pimento isA pimiento is a sweet, thick-walled red pepper, mild and slightly sweeter than a bell pepper. Fresh ones are seasonal and regional; whole canned or jarred pimientos will work, though they are already soft and will not hold a filling as well as a fresh pepper parboiled for three or four minutes.
- Hominy, not gritsHominy, not necessarily grits -- "Hominy" in a 1920 recipe may mean whole cooked hominy (hulled corn kernels, sold today canned as hominy or pozole corn) or hominy grits; period usage varied by region and author, so either reading is defensible. One tablespoon in a cup of potato is a texture accent, not a bulk ingredient. If you use cooked grits, the filling will be softer and pastier.
- Cold potatoesLeftover boiled or steamed potatoes, roughly mashed or diced small.
- The bacon must be cooked firstThe bacon is probably cooked -- "A little bacon" most likely means cooked bacon, chopped, perhaps with a spoonful of its fat to bind the filling; two or three rashers is a reasonable reading. Finely chopped raw bacon may not render fully in the time a stuffed pepper needs.
- Seasoning by eyeOnion juice — grated onion pressed through a sieve — was the period's way of getting onion flavor without pieces; a teaspoon of grated onion does the same job. A teaspoon of Worcestershire and a few tablespoons of crumbs to take up moisture is about right, but taste before stuffing, since nothing here is raw.
- No oven givenThe recipe stops at "stuff pimentoes" and gives no cooking direction. Since the filling components are already cooked, the peppers need only soften and the top brown: a moderate oven, around 350F, for 20 to 25 minutes in a shallow dish with a little water in the bottom is a workable modern reading. Extra crumbs and a dot of bacon fat on top help.
- YieldA cup of potato fills three or four medium pimientos, or two large sweet peppers — a side dish for three or four, or a light supper for two.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia readers just after the First World War, and this recipe carries the marks of that moment: it begins with cold potatoes and uses "a little" bacon rather than a measured amount. Wartime food conservation campaigns, for which Wilson wrote, had trained cooks to build dishes around leftovers, and the stuffed vegetable was a convenient vehicle — a container for whatever was in the icebox. The pimiento itself was a comparatively new fixture in American kitchens; the sweet Spanish-type pepper is generally associated with Georgia growers in the years around 1910, and it reached most households in cans, which is why it turns up in period cookbooks in pimiento cheese, in salads, and here as a shell to be filled.