No. 806

Green or Red Peppers

Piments Verts ou Rouges

Divide them into four parts, or else cut them up fine; they may be boiled once in boiling water, refreshed and seasoned as a salad, or eaten simply raw without blanching. If they are previously pickled in vinegar, squeeze the vinegar from them, and season them with oil, salt and pepper, surrounding the dish with small white onions.

Red and sweet peppers are plunged into hot frying fat to remove the first skin, then cut then in two to broil over a slow fire, seasoning with salt, mignonette, pepper, oil and vinegar.

← No. 805 Oyster Crabs, Pickled Cold Side Dishes No. 807 Potatoes, Chiffonnade →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer gives four treatments of peppers in one paragraph: blanched and dressed, raw, pickled and dressed, and skinned and broiled. Read it as a set of options rather than a single sequence.

The hinge: peelingThe whole point of plunging peppers into hot fat is to loosen and blister the tough outer skin so it can be rubbed off. A broiler, a gas flame or a 450F oven does the same job with less spatter; blister them until the skin is blackened in patches, then cover for ten minutes to steam before peeling.
MignonetteMignonette pepper is coarsely cracked peppercorn, traditionally white or a white-and-black mix, not a fine grind. Crack it under a pan bottom rather than using a mill on its coarsest setting.
"Refreshed"Standard nineteenth-century kitchen French for plunging the blanched vegetable into cold water to stop the cooking and fix the colour. A bowl of ice water is the modern equivalent, and the peppers should be dried well before dressing or the oil will slide off.
"Boiled once"This means a single brief blanch, not a hard boil. Two to three minutes in salted water is enough to take the raw edge off strips of sweet pepper; longer and they go limp and grey.
Slow fireFor the broiled version, a slow fire is low, steady heat, roughly the coolest part of a charcoal grill or a broiler rack set well down. The dip in hot fat only lifts the skin, so this stage is where the peppers actually cook, and slowly.
Small white onionsPearl or silverskin onions, blanched and peeled, or the pickled cocktail onions sold in jars, which suit the pickled-pepper version better. They are a garnish ringing the dish, not a mixed-in ingredient.
Which peppersThe entry heads itself "Piments Verts ou Rouges" but specifies "red and sweet peppers" only for the broiled treatment, so it is not certain whether hotter types are meant to be excluded from the earlier options. A mix of red bells and long Italian frying peppers is a reasonable modern choice.
Yield and serviceNo quantity is given. Reckon on one large pepper per person as a cold side dish, dressed at least half an hour ahead so the oil and vinegar can penetrate, and served at room temperature rather than fridge-cold.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole repertoire in a single volume, which is why entries like this one read as terse lists of variations rather than recipes proper: they were aide-memoires for cooks who already knew the drill. Ranhofer files peppers among the cold side dishes alongside pickled oyster crabs and a chiffonnade of potatoes, the sort of dishes a diner would meet as hors d'oeuvre. The technique of blistering the skin in hot fat suits a kitchen with deep fat always at temperature; the flavour of a fire-charred pepper, prized today, seems here to be incidental to getting the skin off.