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Shrimps in Peppers
2 cups cooked shrimps, fresh or canned I tablespoon butter 1/2 teaspoon mustard Pepper Nutmeg Celery seed I egg 1/2 cup bread-crums 6 green peppers Prepare shrimps as directed. Cut off the stem ends or tops of the peppers, and remove the seeds and veins, and soak the peppers in cold water for one-half hour. Cream the butter by heating and then also beat into it the seasonings and egg. Add the crums, mixing the ingredients well, and finally stirring in the shrimps. Drain the peppers and fill with the prepared stuffing. Set them in a pan, open side up, and bake in a hot oven for twenty minutes.
A straightforward stuffed-pepper dish from the era when canned shrimp was a pantry staple. Two things need attention: the oven temperature and the fact that the peppers go in raw.
- Hot ovenIn period usage roughly 400-450F; the recipe itself gives no temperature. Twenty minutes at that heat browns the filling, but the raw pepper shells will likely still be firm, particularly at the base.
- Soaking the peppersThe recipe gives no reason for the half-hour cold soak; freshening limp market peppers is one plausible explanation. With modern bell peppers it does little. If you want them tender, parboil the hollowed shells three to four minutes and drain them well before filling.
- Unmeasured seasoningsPepper, nutmeg and celery seed are listed without quantities. Start with a scant 1/4 teaspoon celery seed, a pinch of nutmeg and several grinds of pepper for the full batch.
- No salt listedCanned shrimp carries plenty of salt; freshly cooked shrimp does not. If using fresh, add about 1/2 teaspoon salt to the filling.
- "Cream the butter by heating"One tablespoon of butter, softened or just melted, then beaten with the mustard, spices and egg. Let it cool slightly before adding the egg so it does not scramble.
- CrumsThe recipe does not say whether the crumbs are soft and fresh or dry. Soft fresh crumbs bind the shrimp without drying the filling; if you use dry crumbs, allow a spoonful or two of milk.
- Shrimp sizeTwo cups of cooked shrimp is roughly 3/4 lb picked meat. Chop anything larger than a small salad shrimp so the filling holds together when cut.
- YieldSix whole stuffed peppers, enough for six as a first course or three as a main dish with rice.
Stuffed green peppers spread widely through American cookbooks in the first decades of the twentieth century, helped along by the growth of commercial canning: canned shrimp, canned pimientos and more reliable year-round bell peppers all became available to ordinary kitchens in roughly the same period. The New Delineator Recipes came out of The Delineator, a Butterick magazine, and dishes like this one — a cheap vegetable shell carrying a small quantity of an expensive protein, stretched with crumbs and bound with an egg — fit that economy of cooking. The instruction to "prepare shrimps as directed" points back to a general method given elsewhere in the book, a common cross-referencing habit in cookbooks of the period.