Home › Entrées and Made-Over Dishes › Peppers with Meat Stuffing
Peppers with Meat Stuffing
6 green peppers
½ cup bread- or cracker-crums
1 cup cooked meat, chopped
Milk or cream fine
Prepare peppers as directed. Mix the meat with the bread or cracker-crums and moisten with a little milk or cream. Be sure that it is rather highly seasoned. (The potted meats that come in cans are excellent for this purpose.) Fill the peppers with the mixture and serve at once or cover with buttered crums and brown in the oven.
A thrift recipe built around leftovers, written for cooks who already knew how to ready a pepper shell. Two things need filling in: the missing preparation step and the fact that the filling supplies all the flavor.
- "Prepare peppers as directed"The book assumes an earlier entry that is not reproduced here; standard practice of the period was to cut off the stem end, remove seeds and white ribs, and parboil the shells briefly before filling. Unparboiled peppers will stay crisp and raw-tasting under the brief browning this recipe calls for.
- CrumsAn older spelling of crumbs. Half a cup of dry bread or cracker crumbs to a cup of chopped meat is a fairly dense filling; add the milk a tablespoon at a time until it just holds together, not until it is wet.
- Potted meatsThe canned potted meat recommended in the parenthesis was a heavily salted, finely ground paste. If you use it, omit added salt entirely. Chopped leftover roast beef, lamb, ham or chicken is closer to what most cooks would want now.
- "Rather highly seasoned"This is the hinge. Bland meat plus crumbs plus milk in a parboiled pepper tastes of nothing. Season the filling aggressively before it goes in — salt, pepper, a little onion cooked soft, mustard or Worcestershire — and taste it raw-ish before filling.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no temperature or time, only "brown in the oven." For the browned version, a hot oven (around 400F) for 15 to 20 minutes will set the buttered crumb top and heat the filling through. The meat is already cooked, so you are reheating, not baking.
- The unbaked version"Serve at once" only works if the filling goes in hot and the shells come straight from the parboiling water. Bring the meat mixture to steaming in a pan first; a cold filling in a warm pepper is unpleasant and reheats leftover meat only partway.
- YieldSix stuffed peppers, enough for three as a main course with a starch alongside, or six as a lighter course.
"Made-over dishes" was a standard household term for cooking that turned yesterday's roast into today's dinner, and whole chapters of turn-of-the-century American manuals were given to it -- croquettes, hashes, timbales, and stuffed vegetables of every kind. Stuffed peppers appear in U.S. cookbooks with increasing frequency from the 1890s onward, as sweet bell peppers became more widely available in northern markets. The cheerful endorsement of "the potted meats that come in cans" is characteristic of the period: commercially canned potted meat was cheap and shelf-stable, and domestic writers treated it as a modern convenience rather than something to apologize for.