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Peppers with Cheese Stuffing
6 green peppers
1 tablespoon melted butter
1 cup crums
Salt
½ cup chopped cheese
Prepare peppers as directed. Mix the crums with the cheese. Then add the butter and salt to taste. Fill the peppers with the mixture and serve with the meat course.
A short accompaniment recipe that leans on a cross-reference the modern reader does not have. Everything hinges on what "prepare peppers as directed" meant in the original book.
- "Prepare peppers as directed""Prepare peppers as directed" points to a preparation given elsewhere in the book that the modern reader does not have. Period practice for stuffed peppers was generally to cut off the stem end, remove the seeds and white ribs, and parboil the shells briefly before filling; without some pre-cooking the shells will still be firm when the filling is hot.
- CrumsAn older spelling of crumbs, and most likely dry bread crumbs rather than fresh, though the recipe does not say. Fresh crumbs will soak up the butter and go pasty; dried, coarse crumbs, about 1 cup, or panko at a pinch.
- Chopped cheeseA firm American or Cheddar-type cheese, cut small rather than grated. Half a cup chopped is roughly 2 oz; grating it gives a smoother melt if you prefer.
- No baking instructionThe recipe gives none at all, and does not say the filled peppers are baked. If you want the filling hot and the crumb top browned, an oven at 350F for 20 to 25 minutes will do it.
- Salt to tasteJudge it after mixing in the cheese, not before. A sharp aged Cheddar carries enough salt on its own; a mild one needs a good pinch.
- Yield and servingSix peppers, served one per person alongside the meat course rather than as a main dish. As written this is a garnish-scale portion, not a stuffed-pepper supper.
- Butter quantityOne tablespoon for a cup of dry crumbs is lean by modern standards and the filling can come out dusty. Two tablespoons binds it without making it greasy.
Stuffed green peppers arrive in American cookbooks in real numbers around the turn of the twentieth century, once bell peppers were cheap and widely grown, and the job such recipes do is to dress up a plain meat course or use something already in the pantry. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company for the readers of its fashion magazines, was aimed at households running on a budget with some pretension to style, and a filled pepper served beside the roast did both jobs at once. Note that it is a vegetable case for cheese and crumbs rather than for meat; the meat-filled stuffed pepper that dominates later American cooking is a sibling recipe, not the ancestor of this one.