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Stuffing for Green Peppers
Thoroughly heat a teaspoon butter in a small saucepan, add three finely chopped, sound shallots and half ounce finely chopped, cooked lean ham, lightly mix and gently cook for two minutes. Sprinkle a teaspoon flour over, stir well for half minute, then pour in a gill demi-glace; after removing the seeds from the remaining small pepper finely mince it up and add to the pan with four finely chopped canned mushrooms, half teaspoon finely chopped parsley and the meat of two raw sausages. Season with two saltspoons pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix all well together and cook for eight minutes. Remove the pan to a table, add three tablespoons fresh bread crumbs, thoroughly stir, then use as directed.
A component recipe from a larger dish: the peppers themselves, and the baking, are handled elsewhere, which is why it ends "use as directed." The quantities are small — this is a filling for a few peppers, not a party batch.
- A gillHalf a cup. A gill of demi-glace is a substantial amount of sauce for this quantity of solids, and it should reduce to a thick, barely fluid mass during the eight minutes of cooking.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So half a teaspoon of pepper and a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg — the pepper reading is aggressive by modern taste, and worth halving on a first attempt. Note that no salt is specified: the ham, sausage and demi-glace are expected to carry it.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened; a professional kitchen of this period would generally have had some standing. A good jarred or frozen demi-glace works, or reduce 1 cup of strong beef or veal stock to a scant half cup. Bouillon cubes will make the whole filling salty.
- The remaining small pepperThe phrase points back to a parent recipe in which peppers were hollowed out and one apparently reserved to be minced into the filling. If you are working from this page alone, mince one small green pepper for the stuffing and count on filling four to six more.
- Raw sausage meatThe hinge. Eight minutes in a shallow pan will not cook sausage meat through, and it is not meant to — the filling finishes in the oven inside the peppers. Bake until the centre of the stuffing reaches 160F, roughly 30 to 40 minutes at 350F for medium peppers. Break the sausage up well so no dense lumps survive.
- Canned mushroomsStandard hotel stock at the time and perfectly usable. Four small button mushrooms, sautéed until their water has gone, give more flavour; drain canned ones thoroughly or the filling will loosen.
- Bread crumbs off the heatThe crumbs go in with the pan removed from the fire, so they swell in the sauce without scorching. Fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dried packaged ones, which will drink the demi-glace and turn the filling pasty.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half of filling — enough for four to six small green peppers, or three large ones halved lengthwise.
Alexander Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and his books read like a professional's notebook: components written separately, cross-referenced, and assembled on demand. That is exactly what this page is — the interior of a stuffed pepper, sent out from a kitchen where demi-glace, cooked lean ham and chopped parsley were already at hand. Filippini's treatment is frankly French: a shallot and ham base, flour, brown sauce, nutmeg, crumbs to bind. The nutmeg is the period marker. It was standard seasoning for forcemeats and sausage mixtures throughout nineteenth-century professional cookery, and it is often said to have receded from savoury use in English-speaking kitchens over the following decades in a way it did not in France or the Netherlands.