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Stuffed Peppers (II)
1 Tablespoon Butter Substitute or Drippings 2 Tablespoons Barley Flour 1 Cup Milk 1 Cup Cooked Fish 1 Cup Cooked Hominy Salt and Pepper to Taste 1 Teaspoon Grated Onion 1 Tablespoon Minced Parsley Melt fat, stir in wholewheat flour and when smooth add the milk gradually, stirring constantly until thick. Mix together the balance of the ingredients; stir into the sauce and fill the green pepper halves from which seeds have been removed and which have been parboiled five minutes. Cover the top with fine crumbs and bits of butter substitute; bake in a moderate oven fifteen minutes.
A wartime white-sauce filling that stretches leftover fish with hominy. It comes together fast, and the only real work is getting the sauce thick enough that the filling holds its shape.
- The flour contradictionThe ingredient list calls for barley flour, the method says wholewheat. Either works; both are weaker thickeners than white flour, so expect a looser sauce and cook it a full two minutes after it bubbles to lose the raw taste.
- Butter substituteMost likely oleomargarine, though the term also covered vegetable shortenings and other nut or seed fats; drippings are named as the alternative. Butter, margarine or a neutral oil all do the job; nothing is lost.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F. Fifteen minutes only heats the filling through and colours the crumbs — everything in the dish is already cooked.
- HominyWhole hulled hominy (canned, drained and roughly chopped) or cooked hominy grits both fit. Grits give a smoother filling, whole hominy a chewier one.
- Cooked fishThis is a leftovers recipe: flaked cod, haddock, salmon or canned salmon or tuna. Pick out bones, and keep the flakes reasonably large so the filling does not turn to paste.
- Parboiling the peppersFive minutes in boiling water leaves them firm and still bright. If you prefer them soft, give them eight to ten minutes and drain them cut-side down before filling.
- Sauce consistencyOne cup of milk to two tablespoons of soft flour is on the thin side. Reduce it until it coats the spoon heavily before you fold in the fish, or the filling will slump out of the halves.
- YieldThe recipe never says how many peppers; the roughly two and a half cups of filling should fill somewhere between four and six halves, two to three servings as a light main course.
The vocabulary points to wartime cookery: barley flour instead of wheat, "butter substitute" instead of butter, fish instead of meat. Substitutions of this kind were urged on American households by the Food Administration during the First World War, when wheat, fat and meat were being conserved for shipment to Europe and cookbooks were reworked into instruments of conservation. Hominy — corn treated with alkali to loosen the hulls, a technique taken from Indigenous cooking of the Americas — was promoted in the same campaign as a homegrown alternative to wheat. The result here is a leftovers dish in the honest sense: stuffed peppers built from whatever the icebox held, bound with a thin sauce and given respectability by a crumb topping.