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Stuffed Sweet Green Peppers
Six green peppers, two cups soft bread or cracker crumbs, pinch salt, two cups finely chopped cold meat. Cut a slice from stem end of pepper, remove seeds, fill with equal parts meat and crumbs, seasoned with salt, onion juice, pinch of sage and finely chopped celery and green pepper may be added. Moisten filling with milk or stock-one cup. Replace slice on top, pinning with toothpick, putting water in pan and baking until brown and soft. Serve in a ring of toast or bake in the toast.
— Mrs. C. E. Cheney
A tidy way to use up cold roast meat, written for cooks who already knew how long a stuffed pepper takes. The gaps are oven temperature, time and pepper preparation.
- Oven and timingNo temperature or time is given. A moderate oven (about 350F) works; expect roughly three quarters of an hour, and cover the dish if the tops colour before the shells soften. The recipe's "until brown and soft" is the only doneness cue given, and it is the right one — the filling is already cooked meat, so you are only heating through and softening the shells.
- The water in the panThe recipe says only to put water in the pan; a shallow layer is enough. It steams the lower half of the peppers while the top browns and keeps the walls from scorching. Do not skip it and do not let it boil dry.
- Blanch first if you want them tenderIf your peppers are thick-walled, drop the hollowed shells in boiling water for 3 minutes and drain upside down before filling, or the baking time stretches past the point where the filling dries out.
- "Cold meat"Any cooked leftover roast — beef, lamb, veal, chicken, ham — chopped fine rather than ground, as the recipe specifies. Two cups is roughly 10-12 oz.
- Onion juiceA standard seasoning of the period: a grated onion pressed through a sieve or squeezed in cloth, giving flavour without visible pieces. A teaspoon of grated onion or a small quantity of finely minced shallot does the same work.
- MoisteningOne cup of milk or stock for two cups of crumbs plus two cups of meat gives a filling that holds together but is not wet. Add it gradually; cracker crumbs absorb far more than soft bread crumbs, so the volume you need varies.
- ToothpicksWooden picks to hold the cut lids on are still the simplest method, but count them out and count them back before serving.
- YieldSix peppers, one each as a main course with the toast, or half a pepper as part of a larger meal.
Stuffed peppers appear across American community cookbooks from the 1890s onward. The construction here — chopped cold meat extended with bread or cracker crumbs, bound with milk or stock and seasoned with sage and onion — looks very much like the standard nineteenth-century forcemeat, the sort of mixture that might otherwise have gone into a meat pie, croquettes or a stuffed onion; on that reading the pepper is the container, not the subject. Church and society cookbooks like the Philathea, compiled from members' contributions and sold to raise funds, are full of these leftover-management recipes, and the instruction to serve in a ring of toast or bake the pepper directly on the toast reflects a kitchen where nothing that could carry gravy was thrown out.