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Stuffed Peppers
6 green peppers
1 cup water or stock
½ onion
1¼ cups moistened bread-crums
1¼ cups cooked meat (veal,
Salt and pepper chicken or ham)
1 tablespoon drippings or butter
Cut a slice from the stem end of each pepper. Remove seeds and parboil peppers ten minutes. Mix finely chopped cooked meat with moistened bread-crums, add salt, pepper and the onion, grated. Stuff the peppers with this mixture and stand them in a dripping-pan. Add water or stock. Bake fifteen minutes, basting ✓ frequently. Cooked rice may be used instead of the bread-crums. Potato Recipe SCALLOPE
A thrifty use for leftover roast meat, built on a bread-crumb binder rather than rice or grain. The method is sound; only the quantities and the baking time need attention.
- Bread-crumb quantityThe printed ingredient list gives 1¼ cups moistened crumbs, matching the text here. Work from the meat if you like: 1¼ cups chopped cooked meat takes about its own volume in soft crumbs, moistened with a few spoonfuls of stock until the mixture holds together but is not pasty.
- Moistened crumbsThese are soft fresh crumbs from the inside of a loaf, dampened with stock or milk, not dry packaged crumbs. Dry crumbs will drink the liquid and bake into a dense plug.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F. Fifteen minutes is enough only to heat through a filling that is already cooked and peppers that have been parboiled; give it 25 to 30 minutes if you want the tops browned.
- ParboilingTen minutes in boiling water is on the long side for thin-walled modern bell peppers, which will slump. Five to seven minutes gives a pepper that still stands up in the pan.
- DrippingsDrippings or butter, as the recipe allows. The method never says what to do with the tablespoon of fat; working it through the filling is the obvious reading.
- The pan liquidThe cup of water or stock goes in the bottom of the pan, not into the peppers. It keeps the skins from scorching and provides the basting liquid, so top it up if it cooks away.
- SeasoningCooked leftover meat and bread crumbs are bland. Taste and correct the filling before it goes into the peppers, since there is no chance to adjust afterwards. Half a grated onion is modest; a whole small one is not out of place.
- YieldSix peppers, one apiece, as a light main course with bread and a salad.
Stuffed peppers belong to the American household economy of the early twentieth century, where a recipe's real subject is often the Sunday roast eaten a second time on Tuesday. Butterick, a pattern company that sold domestic advice alongside dress patterns to a largely middle-class readership, filled its vegetable chapter with dishes of exactly this kind: a cheap vegetable made substantial with a cup or so of chopped leftovers and a binder of stale bread. Green peppers were probably still a seasonal item in much of the country, and the note that cooked rice may replace the crumbs reflects both frugality and what is often described as a wider Mediterranean and Middle Eastern tradition of rice-stuffed vegetables that American cooks may have been encountering through immigrant neighbours.