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Green Peppers, Stuffed
Plunge into boiling water for two minutes one very small and three fine, large, sound green peppers. Remove and neatly peel them with a towel. Split the three large ones in even halves, lengthwise. Keep the smaller one as it is. Remove the seeds, nicely clean the pods, then fill with a stuffing. Spread a tablespoon fresh bread crumbs over their surface. Lay them on a lightly buttered pan, place over each pepper a dot of butter, then set in a brisk oven for ten minutes, or till of a nice golden colour. Remove, dress on a hot dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A short, confident set of instructions that assumes you already have a stuffing to hand — the sort of shorthand common in cookbooks written by professional chefs for a kitchen where a bowl of forcemeat or rice filling was always waiting.
- The missing stuffingNo filling is specified at all. Ten minutes in the oven only browns the crumbs and heats the pepper through, so raw sausage, raw rice or raw grain fillings will not cook in that time. Use a mixture that is fully cooked before it goes in.
- "Brisk oven"Roughly 400–425°F. That heat is what gives the crumb topping colour in ten minutes; at 350°F you will get pale, soft crumbs and a limp pepper.
- Blanch and peelTwo minutes in boiling water loosens the skin enough to rub off with a towel. If the skin resists, char them under a broiler until blistered instead, then peel. Peeling is optional but does change the texture noticeably.
- Dot of butterNot decoration. Without fat on top the crumbs will dry rather than brown. Use about a half teaspoon per half.
- "Dress on a hot dish with a folded napkin"A restaurant convention: the folded linen absorbs any butter that runs and keeps the peppers from sliding. Skip it at home, or use a warmed platter.
- YieldSix halves plus one whole pepper — a first course or side for three, or lunch for two.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, and the phrasing — split, peel with a towel, dress with a folded napkin — is that of a career hotel and restaurant cook rather than a domestic writer; Filippini worked for many years at Delmonico's in New York. Stuffed peppers reached American tables from more than one direction: from Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking, where hollowed vegetables filled with rice and meat have a long history, and from the Hungarian and Balkan kitchens whose paprika peppers came with late-nineteenth-century immigration. A chef's collection like this one reduces those origins to a single technique that can be filled with whatever the kitchen has.