Plunge the sweet peppers in hot fat, or broil them, to be able to remove the light skin; divide each one in two, cut away the hard parts and saute slowly in oil, cooking them at the same time; season with salt, prepared red pepper (No. 168), finely chopped shallot and parsley; dress in a vegetable dish and serve. Instead of fresh sweet peppers canned ones can be substituted, these being imported from Spain.
A short Ranhofer entry that assumes you already know how to blister and peel a pepper. The whole dish rests on getting the skin off cleanly and then cooking the flesh slowly enough in oil that it collapses rather than browns.
Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how a Mediterranean peasant habit reached an American luxury kitchen: peppers were arguably still somewhat unfamiliar in the northern United States, known mainly through Spanish, Italian and Creole cooking. His note that canned sweet peppers were "imported from Spain" is a useful marker of the period, since the Spanish pimiento canning industry around Murcia and Navarra was then an important source of supply, and commercial American canning of pimientos in Georgia dates only from around 1911, growing through the 1910s and 1920s. The technique itself, charring a pepper to lift the skin and then stewing the flesh in oil with garlic or shallot, is generally traced to Spain and southern Italy well before it was written down in a professional French idiom, and Ranhofer simply files it under its French name, piments doux sautes, as he does with nearly every borrowed dish in the book.