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Stuffed Peppers with Crab Meat
Cut a slice from the stem-end of as many green sweet peppers as needed, remove seeds and partition walls and parboil for five minutes. Brush the inside of each with melted butter and fill with a mixture made of equal quantities of cooked rice and cold crab meat. Moisten the rice with a little sweet cream and add one tablespoonful of grated cheese to a cup of rice. Season the crab meat with salt, paprika, and a few drops of lemon - juice.
Mix all lightly together and have it quite moist.
Place the peppers in an agate baking-pan, surround with boiling water, adding half a tablespoonful of butter to half a cup of water. Baste now and then.
Cook about fifteen minutes.
Scallop of Fried Fish with Fresh Tomatoes Remove the skin and bones from any kind of fried fish. Season highly, adding Worcestershire if liked. Arrange in a buttered baking-dish in alternate layers with peeled and sliced fresh tomatoes. Season tomatoes well with salt, pepper, and dots of butter. Cover top with well-buttered cracker-crumbs. Cook in a moderate oven until tomatoes are quite soft and crumbs browned.
Broiled Sardines on Toast Prepare pieces of toast, moistening with butter melted in hot water. Broil sardines until well heated through, place on toast on platter, and garnish with parsley and slices of lemon.
Three short left-over fish dishes run together on one page; the pepper recipe is the substantial one, and the two that follow it are assembly jobs. Quantities are given by ratio rather than by number, so scale to the peppers you have.
- Oven temperatureThe pepper recipe gives none; around 375F suits it, and the fifteen minutes quoted is enough only because the peppers are already parboiled and the filling is fully cooked. For the fried-fish scallop, "a moderate oven" is usually taken as about 350-375F.
- Agate baking-panAgate ware is enamelled steel, the speckled graniteware of the period. Any non-reactive dish works; avoid bare aluminium or cast iron here, since the tomato and lemon juice will pick up a metallic edge.
- The water in the panThe boiling water and butter around the peppers are a steam-and-baste arrangement, not a sauce. Keep the liquid shallow, no more than a third of the way up the peppers, or the skins slump and the filling weeps.
- Ratios, made concreteEqual parts cooked rice and picked crab, one tablespoon grated cheese per cup of rice, and cream enough to make the mixture loose. A cup of rice with a cup of crab fills three to four medium bell peppers.
- Crab meatThe book assumes yesterday's cooked crab. Refrigerated pasteurised lump crab is the practical equivalent; drain it well, since it carries more liquid than freshly picked meat and the filling is meant to be moist, not wet.
- "Season highly"In the fish scallop this is doing real work. Fried fish reheated in layers with tomato tastes flat without a firm hand on salt, pepper and the Worcestershire, which the tomatoes otherwise swallow.
- Cracker-crumbsCrushed saltines or common crackers, not fine breadcrumbs. Toss them with melted butter until they look damp throughout, or they scorch before the tomatoes soften.
- Sardines under the broilerTinned sardines only need to be heated through, a minute or two close to the element. Longer and they dry out and break up on the toast.
- YieldTwo stuffed peppers make a light main course, one alongside soup or salad. The scallop serves three or four depending on how much fish was left.
Left-over cookery books were a genre of their own in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a household cooked large joints and whole fish and was expected to account for every scrap; thrift was presented as a matter of skill rather than of poverty. The stuffed pepper here belongs to a wave of American recipes that took up sweet peppers as an edible container, and the pairing with crab and rice has often been read as a coastal touch, though the recipe itself gives no indication of where it came from. The instruction to set the pan in boiling water and baste reflects the uneven heat of a coal or early gas range, where a moist environment protected a delicate filling from a fierce bottom. Broiled sardines on toast, meanwhile, is a relic of the tinned-fish enthusiasm of the same period, when sardines were a standard pantry staple and a savoury on toast was an accepted supper or luncheon dish rather than a snack.