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Stuffed and Baked Green Peppers
Wash ten or a dozen large green peppers, put them into boiling water, and boil for five minutes; take them from the water and remove the skins by rubbing with a wet cloth. Cut off the stem ends, remove the seeds with a large spoon, and stuff the peppers with any kind of minced cold meat, mixed with an equal quantity of stale bread moistened with cold water, and properly season with salt. Replace the stems, set the peppers in a deep earthen dish or plate, pour in as much cold gravy as the dish will hold, and bake them in a moderate oven for half an hour. They may be stuffed with sausage-meat and bread. Serve on the dish in which they were baked. Cheese may be grated and mixed with breadcrumbs for stuffing peppers; and they should then be fried instead of being baked.
A leftovers dish dressed for the hotel table. The instructions assume a kitchen with yesterday's roast and a stockpot of gravy on hand; the substitutions are easy, but two details are worth pinning down.
- Moderate ovenRead this as roughly 350F (period "moderate" is usually rendered somewhere between 350F and 375F). Half an hour at that heat is enough to warm cooked meat through and set the crumb, which is all the baked version is asked to do.
- The sausage version needs longerCold cooked meat only needs reheating, but raw sausage-meat packed into a pepper may well not reach a safe internal temperature (160F for ground pork, 165F for a stuffing) in thirty minutes. Check the centre of the stuffing with a thermometer and give it the extra time it wants.
- Blanching and peelingFive minutes in boiling water loosens the skin and takes the raw edge off the pepper; three to four minutes is usually plenty. A wet cloth still works, though a paring knife is faster.
- Cold gravyThis means leftover meat gravy from a roast. Any well-flavoured brown stock or thinned pan gravy does the job. The recipe has you pour in as much as the dish will hold, and it functions as a braising liquid rather than a sauce to serve.
- Stale breadDay-old crumb, torn and soaked in cold water, then squeezed out. Fresh sandwich bread turns to paste; dried breadcrumbs from a tin absorb too little and leave the stuffing dry.
- The earthen dishA deep stoneware or earthenware baking dish, as the recipe specifies, taken to the table as it comes from the oven. Any heavy ceramic or enamelled dish that holds the peppers upright and close together will serve.
- Season beyond saltThe original stops at salt. If you are using plain stock, add pepper, a little onion softened in fat, and whatever herb suited the original roast.
- The fried cheese variantFor the cheese and breadcrumb stuffing the recipe directs frying rather than baking. Fry them in shallow fat, turning, until the outside colours and the filling melts.
- YieldTen to twelve peppers serve eight to ten as a course on their own, or five or six as a main dish. The recipe halves without adjustment.
Oscar Tschirky was not a cook by trade but the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and his 1896 book gathers as much practical hotel housekeeping as it does show cookery — this entry is squarely in the first camp. Stuffed peppers belong to the great nineteenth-century category of made dishes, the respectable way to bring yesterday's joint back to the table without calling it a hash: the pepper is a container, the gravy is the thrift, and the cold meat is whatever the larder holds. Sweet peppers are often said to have been a comparatively recent arrival in northeastern American home cooking at the time, more familiar through Spanish, Italian and Creole channels than through English tradition. The closing note about a cheese and crumb stuffing, fried rather than baked, is the kind of aside that marks the book as a working reference rather than a set of fixed formulas.