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Stuffed Peppers
1 Can Sardines 2 Tablespoons Pickles, Chopped 2 Tablespoons Olives, Chopped Mayonnaise Salt and Pepper Pick sardines into fine pieces; mix other ingredients with them. Remove the stem end, seeds and membrane and soak in salt water. Drain the peppers dry and fill with salad. Garnish with lettuce leaves and olives.
A cold salad served in raw pepper shells, from the era when "salad" often meant something bound with mayonnaise and used as a filling. Everything hinges on the peppers being crisp and dry before they are filled.
- Quantities left openThe recipe never says how many peppers. One standard can of sardines (3.75 oz today) plus the pickles, olives and dressing makes roughly a cup of filling, which fills two to three small bell peppers or four narrow ones.
- The salt-water soakNo time is given. Thirty minutes in cold, well-salted water is enough to take the raw edge off the pepper and keep it firm; longer and it begins to soften and go limp. Use cold water, not warm, and refrigerate if the kitchen is hot.
- Dry them properlyThis is the instruction that matters. A wet pepper shell weeps into mayonnaise and the filling slumps into a puddle. Invert the drained shells on a towel for ten minutes and blot the inside cavity as well.
- Which peppersA salad recipe of this period most likely means green bell peppers, though ripe red peppers were also sold. Red, yellow or orange are sweeter and work as well; small pointed sweet peppers make neater individual servings.
- PicklesThe pickle here is most likely chopped cucumber pickle, sweet or sour. Modern dill or bread-and-butter pickle both work, but drain the chopped pickle in a sieve or the mayonnaise thins.
- SardinesOil-packed sardines with skin and bones were the usual tinned sort in this period; the bones are soft and mash into the mixture. Drain them well. Water-packed or skinless fillets give a milder, drier result and may want a little extra mayonnaise.
- ServingChill the filled peppers at least an hour, then either serve whole on a lettuce leaf or slice crosswise into half-inch rings, which is the tidier presentation and stretches two peppers to six or eight portions.
Stuffed raw vegetables filled with a mayonnaise-bound mixture were a fixture of American salad courses from the 1890s through the 1930s, when the "salad" was expected to arrive shaped, garnished and cold rather than tossed. Its appearance in a cookbook of the period is telling: canned sardines, bottled olives and jarred pickle meant a presentable course could be assembled by a new housekeeper in minutes with no cooking at all, and the pepper shell did the decorative work that an older kitchen would have done with aspic or a mould. Canned sardines were among the cheapest tinned proteins of the period and turn up constantly in salads, sandwich fillings and savouries of these decades.