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Stuffed Sweet Red Peppers
Heat in a saucepan one tablespoon melted butter, add one finely chopped white onion and half ounce finely chopped raw, lean ham and cook for five minutes, frequently stirring; then add three tablespoons raw rice, lightly stir and cook for one minute. Moisten with half gill broth and a gill tomato sauce. Season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper and two saltspoons curry powder; lightly mix, cover the pan, boil for five minutes, then set in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove, lightly butter six individual pudding moulds, place a sweet pepper in each mould, then fill up the peppers with the preparation; trim off any superfluous adherings on the brim of the peppers with a knife. Cover the tops with a round piece of pepper and lay them in a tin, pour hot water in the tin up to half the height of the moulds, set in the oven for fifteen minutes, remove, unmould upon a hot dish and serve.
A rice-stuffed pepper cooked in individual moulds in a water bath, then turned out — a restaurant presentation that explains several otherwise puzzling steps. The original assumes the cook already knows how to prepare the peppers.
- Prepare the peppers firstThe recipe never says to core or soften them: cut off the tops (keep them, they become the lids), remove seeds and ribs, and blanch in boiling salted water two or three minutes so they will bend into the moulds and finish cooking in the fifteen minutes given. Small, squat bell peppers or the round Italian type sit in a mould best.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of broth is 1/4 cup and a gill of tomato sauce is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making the seasoning 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon white pepper and 1/2 teaspoon curry powder.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given for either stage. A moderate oven, 350F, suits both the covered rice and the final water bath.
- Rice quantityThree tablespoons of raw rice with 3/4 cup total liquid swells to roughly a cup of filling — enough for six small peppers, not for large supermarket bells. Use long-grain white rice; par-cooked or converted rice will not absorb the liquid the same way.
- Keep the pan coveredThe rice is meant to steam in a measured amount of liquid and finish dry enough to hold its shape when unmoulded. Lift the lid and the liquid goes off as steam, leaving the grains chalky. Check once at the end of the thirty minutes and add a spoonful of broth only if it has gone dry too soon.
- The water bathHot water halfway up the moulds keeps the peppers from scorching and sets the filling gently. Fill the pan after it is in the oven, or carry it with a folded towel; the point is a low steady heat, not boiling water.
- UnmouldingIndividual pudding moulds can be replaced by ramekins or a deep muffin tin. Butter them properly, let the peppers stand a minute out of the oven, then invert — they come out stem-end down, which is why the trimmed brim matters.
- YieldSix peppers, one per person as a first course or a light supper dish with bread.
The International Cook Book belongs to the wave of early twentieth-century American compendia that promised the home cook the dishes of every nation, filtered through the professional French kitchen of the hotel and restaurant trade — hence the pudding moulds, the water bath and the instruction to trim the brim with a knife, all steps that exist to make a homely stuffed vegetable arrive at the table looking composed. Stuffed peppers are associated with the eastern Mediterranean and Balkan tradition of dolma, vegetables filled with rice and a little meat, and versions are also found in Italian, Spanish and Hungarian cooking. The half ounce of lean raw ham and the two saltspoons of curry powder suggest a period restaurant recipe rather than a transcribed regional one: curry powder was a common seasoning in Anglo-American professional kitchens of the era, used less for Indian flavour than as a general warm note, and it turns up in soups, sauces and stuffings throughout books of this kind.