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Peppers with Meat Stuffing
6 green peppers 1 cup cooked meat, chopped fine 1/2 cup bread-or cracker-crums Milk or cream Prepare peppers as directed. Mix the meat with the bread or cracker-crums and moisten with a little milk or cream. Be sure that it is rather highly seasoned. (The potted meats that come in cans are excellent for this purpose.) Fill the peppers with the mixture and serve at once or cover with buttered crums and brown in the oven.
A leftovers formula from the chapter on made-over dishes, written on the assumption that you have already read the book's basic instruction for preparing pepper cases. The filling is precooked, so all the oven does is heat it through and brown the top.
- "Prepare peppers as directed"Refers back to the book's own instruction for pepper cases, not reproduced here. Period cookbooks generally mean: cut off the stem end or slice lengthwise, remove seeds and membrane, and parboil the shells briefly in salted water, then drain. Raw shells will still be crisp and vegetal by the time the filling is hot.
- CrumsThe book's house spelling of crumbs. Soft bread crumbs give a moister filling than cracker crumbs, which absorb more liquid and firm up as they sit.
- Milk or cream, unmeasuredNo quantity is given because it depends on the crumbs. Add a tablespoon at a time until the mixture just holds together and is not soupy.
- Potted meatsCanned potted meat is generally salty and well seasoned, which suits a filling the book wants "rather highly seasoned." If you use plain leftover roast, chicken or ham instead, that seasoning instruction carries the dish: salt, pepper, onion, and a little mustard or Worcestershire.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature or time, only "brown in the oven." A moderately hot oven for roughly 15 to 20 minutes, just until the buttered crumb topping colors, suits it. Everything inside is already cooked, so longer only dries it out.
- "Serve at once"This is the shortcut version: hot filling in hot parboiled shells, no baking at all. It only works if both components come to the table straight from the stove.
- YieldSix filled peppers (or twelve halves, if split lengthwise). With only a cup of meat among them, this is a light dish rather than a substantial main course.
"Made-over dishes" was the standard household term for what we now call using up leftovers, and such a chapter was common in general cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Delineator was Butterick's women's magazine, and its recipe collections were aimed at cooks running a household on a fixed weekly food budget, where a cup of chopped cooked meat from Sunday's roast was expected to reappear later in the week in a form that did not look like a leftover. Green peppers served that purpose well: cheap in late summer and sturdy enough to act as an edible dish. The parenthetical endorsement of canned potted meat is a period marker too, from the years when commercially canned products were being promoted in magazine kitchens as modern and labor-saving rather than a compromise.