Home › Vegetables › Mexican Stuffed Chili
Mexican Stuffed Chili
Green Peppers (even size) 1 Egg Sardines Cheese Cut the stems, seed and core. Make a stuffing of the sardines and cheese chopped fine; mix with the egg. the peppers. Dip in thick butter and fry in deep, hot fat. Drain in a colander.
Serve very hot.
Stuff come hard. Wash and cut in small pieces. Boil in clear water until tender enough to mash; place in a colander and drain.
A chile relleno in miniature, stuffed with tinned sardines rather than cheese alone. The text as printed has been scrambled in typesetting — the last three sentences ("come hard. Wash and cut in small pieces. Boil in clear water...") belong to a neighbouring vegetable recipe and have nothing to do with the peppers.
- "Thick butter" is thick batterA compositor's slip. The peppers are dipped in a thick fritter batter — flour, egg and a little liquid, or in the Mexican manner beaten egg whites with the yolks folded in — before going into the fat. Butter would burn in deep fat long before the coating set.
- Peel the peppers firstPeeling the peppers -- The original omits any peeling. For chiles rellenos in the Mexican manner the peppers are usually charred over a flame or under the broiler until the skin blisters and then skinned, which helps the batter cling; with sweet bell peppers, period recipes often skip this step.
- Which pepper"Green peppers" in an American cookbook of this period generally means sweet bell peppers. Poblanos are closer to the Mexican original and hold a stuffing better; four to six, matched for size as the recipe's "(even size)" asks, would suit — the original gives no number.
- Frying fat and temperature"Deep, hot fat" would have meant lard or another rendered fat; a modern equivalent is a neutral oil at frying heat, around 365-375F. Too cool and the batter drinks fat, too hot and the coating colours before the filling heats through; a few minutes a side should do.
- SardinesTinned sardines, drained and chopped fine as the recipe directs; the small bones are soft enough to go in with the flesh. Roughly one tin (3-4 oz) to a couple of ounces of grated firm cheese would fill four to six peppers.
- The egg is a binder, not a batterOne egg mixed into the sardine-and-cheese mash holds the stuffing together so it does not run out in the fat. Keep the filling stiff; a loose one will leak.
- DrainingA colander works, but a rack or paper set over a warm plate keeps the underside crisp. Serve at once — the batter softens within a few minutes.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. On the amounts suggested above, four to six stuffed peppers, enough for four as a first course or a light supper dish.
Stuffed and battered chiles were among the Mexican dishes taken up by American cookbook compilers, and by the turn of the twentieth century recipes of this kind turn up in general household manuals outside the Southwest — usually much simplified, and often with bell peppers standing in for poblanos. The sardine filling suggests period and audience: cheap tinned fish was a common pantry item in the 1890s and 1900s, shelf-stable and already salted, and useful whenever a recipe needed savour without fresh meat. Dishes labelled Mexican, Spanish or Creole were a fashionable way to dress up plain vegetables in such collections. The garbled text is characteristic of the format — small books of this kind were set quickly and cheaply, and lines from one recipe could drift into the next.