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Stuffed Peppers
Cut a slice from each stem end of six large green peppers. Remove seeds and parboil fifteen minutes. Mix one pint of finely chopped cooked meat (veal or chicken preferably) with one-half cup of moistened bread crumbs; add salt, pepper and one-half a grated onion. Stuff the peppers with this mixture and stand them in a dripping-pan into which has been put one tablespoon of butter, the remaining half onion sliced and a half pint of water or stock. Bake fifteen minutes basting frequently.
A leftovers dish from a period when cooked meat was always on hand. The instructions are terse in two places that matter: the oven temperature is never given, and the parboil is far longer than green peppers need.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes you know your range. A moderate oven, 350-375F, is right here; the filling is already cooked and only needs heating through and browning.
- Cut the parboilFifteen minutes in boiling water leaves bell peppers slack and grey, and they then bake for fifteen more. Three to five minutes is enough to soften them, and peppers can be stuffed raw if you are willing to bake them 35-40 minutes instead.
- A pint of chopped meatMeasured by volume, not weight: about 2 cups, or roughly 3/4 to 1 lb of cooked veal or chicken off the bone. Any cooked meat works, though the fattier ones make a moister filling.
- Moistened bread crumbsThese are soft crumbs from the inside of a stale loaf, dampened with milk or stock and squeezed out, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Dry crumbs will drink the liquid out of the filling.
- Dripping-panThe shallow pan that sat under a roast. Any roasting pan or baking dish that holds the peppers upright and close together will do; crowding keeps them from tipping.
- Season harder than it saysCooked meat, crumbs and half an onion is a bland base by modern palates. Salt the filling generously and taste it before stuffing, since nothing after this point adds flavour. Thyme, parsley or a little of the pan stock stirred in are period-appropriate additions.
- Basting and the liquidThe half pint of water or stock in the pan is there to steam the pepper walls and to be spooned over the exposed filling so it does not dry. Use stock rather than water if you have it, and check the pan does not run dry.
- The cut-off topsThe recipe does not say what becomes of them. Chop the usable flesh into the filling, or set the caps back on the stuffed peppers for the first ten minutes of baking.
- YieldSix peppers, one apiece as a supper dish with bread, or half a pepper each as a vegetable course alongside a roast.
Stuffed vegetables are ancient, but the American stuffed green pepper of the early twentieth century is best understood as a thrift dish: it appears in household manuals like the Butterick book plausibly because it converts the tail end of a roast into a second dinner. The wording gives the economy away, calling for cooked meat and specifying veal or chicken — both pale scraps that were, one imagines, less appealing cold. Sweet bell peppers were a comparatively recent commercial crop in this period, still seasonal and still often called simply green peppers, and they seem to have become more available to city kitchens as commercial truck farming and rail shipping developed. The technique itself, parboil-stuff-bake, appears to be the same one those books apply to onions, tomatoes and cabbage leaves; the pepper was the newcomer to an established form.