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Baked Fish in Pepper Cases
Carefully remove the skin and bones from any baked fish and season it with salt, pepper, and a 1 little onion juice. Mix with it an equal quantity of left-over stuffing, or coarse crumbs moistened with butter. The mixture should be quite moist; if not, add a little fish stock or milk. Cut lengthwise as many green sweet peppers as needed, remove seeds, parboil five minutes, and fill them with the fish. Put them in an agate baking-pan, surround with hot fish stock or boiling water half an inch deep, and cook until cases are soft, but not broken.
A straightforward way to use up cooked fish and leftover bread stuffing. The original gives no oven temperature, no time and no yield, so the working details below fill the gaps.
- Oven and timingBake at 375F in a shallow pan with the stock coming half an inch up the sides. Parboiled pepper halves soften in about 20 to 25 minutes; the filling is already cooked, so you are only heating it through and slackening the peppers.
- The hinge: parboil, then stopFive minutes in boiling water is enough to take the raw crunch out without collapsing the walls. Lift the halves out and drain them cut-side down before filling, or the water trapped inside will thin the mixture.
- An agate baking-panAgate (or agateware) was speckled enamel over iron or steel, valued because the enamel did not react with acid or salt. Any glass, enamelled or stainless pan does the same job; avoid bare cast iron or aluminium with the salty fish stock.
- Onion juicePeriod cooks grated an onion and used the liquid to get onion flavour without visible pieces. Grate half a small onion on a box grater and press it through a sieve; about a teaspoon of juice per cup of fish is right.
- Coarse crumbsNot the fine dried crumbs sold in canisters. Tear day-old bread into rough pea-sized pieces and toss them with melted butter, roughly two tablespoons of butter per cup of crumbs.
- Judging "quite moist"The filling should hold together when pressed but not be pasty. Add stock or milk a spoonful at a time; too dry and it bakes into a crumb block, too wet and it slumps out of the pepper.
- Which fishAny firm baked white fish, salmon or cooked shellfish works. Cooked fish held under refrigeration should be used within two days and reheated to 165F through the centre of the filling.
- YieldAbout two cups of filling, enough for four to six pepper halves; two halves make a lunch portion with a salad.
Stuffed peppers appear in American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward, and were readily taken up as a vehicle for anything a household needed to use up. Books of this kind belong to the run of "left overs" manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when domestic-science writers were arguing that thrift was a technical skill rather than a shame: the aim was to make the second appearance of a dish look deliberate. The pepper "case" echoes the language of pastry cookery, where a case was an edible container, though the borrowing is an inference rather than a documented one. The instruction to bake in an agate pan is a small period marker, from the decades when enamelled steel ware was widely sold for middle-class kitchens and cookbooks still thought it worth specifying.