No. 756

Spanish Sweet Peppers Sauted, Garnishing

Garniture de Piments Doux d'Espagne Sautes

These peppers are imported from Spain or Havana; select those that are fresh and with thick meat. Put them on the broiler or in the oven, until they soften, and the skin peels off, remove, and open them; suppress all the hard parts and skin; saute them in oil with some chopped onions and mushrooms, seasoning with salt, pepper, and fine herbs. If fresh Spanish sweet peppers cannot be procured, then take the preserved ones; they are already prepared in cans and only need draining to have them ready for use.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A garnish rather than a dish: roasted, peeled sweet peppers sauteed with onion and mushroom, meant to be spooned alongside a meat or fish course. Ranhofer gives no quantities, so treat it as a method.

What the peppers are"Piments doux d'Espagne" are large thick-walled sweet peppers, not chiles. Any fleshy red bell or a Spanish morron will do; thin-walled peppers collapse to nothing once the skin is off.
Roasting to loosen the skinUnder a hot broiler, or in a hot oven, turn them until the skin blisters and lifts; Ranhofer asks only that they soften enough for the skin to peel. Letting them steam covered for a few minutes after roasting makes the skin come away more easily.
"Suppress all the hard parts"This means the stem, core, ribs and every seed, along with the skin the recipe names separately. Seeds left behind spoil the smooth texture the garnish is after.
Fine herbsFines herbes is classically a chopped mix of parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives. Add them off the heat or in the last minute; tarragon and chervil lose their perfume quickly.
The sauteCook the onion in the oil until soft and the mushrooms until their water has gone before the peppers go in. The peppers are already cooked, so they need only two or three minutes to warm through and take up the oil.
Canned peppersRanhofer's tinned substitute is still sold as piquillo or pimiento peppers, whole and already skinned. Drain and pat dry, or the water they carry will stew the onions instead of frying them.
QuantityReckon one large pepper per two people as a garnish. It holds well and is as good at room temperature as hot.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working reference, with garnishes numbered and catalogued so a cook could be sent to a page rather than given a lecture. That Spanish peppers arrive here "imported from Spain or Havana" places the book precisely: New York's fancy trade drew on Caribbean and Iberian shipping, and Cuba was still Spanish territory when he wrote. His remark that the canned ones "only need draining" is a quiet acknowledgment that the tinned pimiento, an industry that grew rapidly in Spain and later in Georgia, had already made a laborious preparation into a pantry item. Roasting peppers over flame to slip the skin is far older than either, and remains the standard method wherever sweet peppers are grown.