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Pepper (Make a sauce of butter flour)
Make a sauce of butter, flour, and milk. Add chicken, potatoes, and truffle, and, as soon as heated, add seasoning.
This is a filling, not a finished dish: a thick white sauce bound with cooked chicken, potato and truffle, meant to be spooned into parboiled green peppers and browned. No quantities are given, so the proportions are yours to set.
- The sauceA stuffing needs a thick white sauce, not a pouring one. Work to roughly 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons flour per cup of milk; anything thinner will run out of the pepper as it bakes.
- Proportions for the fillingThe recipe gives no quantities. Something like 1 cup diced cooked chicken and 1/2 cup diced cooked potato to 1 cup of thick sauce makes a workable filling. Use cooked potato — raw dice will not soften in a short baking.
- TruffleCanned or bottled truffle was available to late-nineteenth-century kitchens and turned up in entrées both sliced and chopped. A teaspoon of minced black truffle, or a few drops of truffle oil stirred in off the heat, gives the same intent; finely chopped sauteed cremini is the honest budget substitute.
- Seasoning added lastThe recipe says only 'seasoning', added once the mixture is hot; salt and pepper are the obvious reading. Adding it at that stage lets you taste the mixture as it will be eaten, when the chicken and potato are already cooked.
- The peppersThe recipe itself describes only the filling. If you are stuffing peppers, cut off the tops, remove seeds and ribs, and parboil briefly in salted water so the flesh gives without collapsing, then drain them upside down.
Stuffed peppers of this kind belong to the late-nineteenth-century American entrée course, where a small made dish of cooked meat bound in white sauce sat between the fish and the roast. The technique is thrifty at heart: a béchamel stretches yesterday's chicken and a boiled potato into something that can be served in a shapely vessel, and the truffle is there to lift a leftover into company food. The instruction to add seasoning only at the end follows a sensible principle — taste the mixture hot, since cold sauce reads flat.