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Stuffed Peppers
1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon melted fat teaspoon pepper cup bread crumbs cup milk Cut Select broad peppers that will stand on end and are easy to serve. top from each pepper. Remove seeds and parboil 15 minutes. Stuff with filling mixed in the order given above. Bake 20 minutes at 400°F. basting frequently with hot water. Any left-over meat can be substituted for the nuts. Tomatoes and rice make an excellent filling for peppers. 1 pint dried lima beans or kidney beans, soaked overnight 2 cups beef chopped 1 teaspoon salt
The instructions survive better than the ingredient list, so treat the amounts as a sketch rather than a formula. What is fixed is the method: parboil, stuff, bake hot with frequent basting.
- The ingredient amounts are incompleteThe pepper, bread crumb and milk quantities have lost their fractions, and the filling calls for nuts that never appear in the list. Salt and fat do survive intact at 1 teaspoon each. A workable crumb stuffing runs about 1 cup soft bread crumbs to 1/2 cup milk, with the teaspoon each of salt and melted fat as given, a pinch of pepper, and about 1/2 cup chopped nuts or cooked meat.
- Choosing the peppersBroad, squat bell peppers with a flat base are what is wanted; the modern tapered varieties tip over in the pan. Trimming a thin slice from the bottom is a fair substitute, so long as you do not cut through.
- ParboilingFifteen minutes in boiling water is long by current practice and leaves the shells slack. Five to eight minutes softens them enough to bite through after baking while they still hold their shape; skip it entirely if you prefer peppers with some resistance and add five minutes to the bake.
- Oven heat400F is given and is right for this. A shallow dish with a little water in the bottom will keep the bases from scorching, though the recipe itself only calls for basting.
- Basting with hot waterThis is the hinge. A bread-and-milk stuffing dries and crusts hard in a hot oven, so the water is there to keep steam around it. Cover the dish for the first ten minutes instead if you would rather not open the oven repeatedly.
- If you use raw meatThe note about substituting left-over meat assumes it is already cooked. Raw ground meat in the filling will not reliably reach 160F in twenty minutes at this heat; either cook it first or allow 35 to 40 minutes and check with a thermometer in the centre of the stuffing.
- YieldThe filling as reconstructed stuffs about four medium peppers. Two per person as a main course, one alongside meat.
Stuffed peppers belong to the era when American home economics teaching pushed vegetables as containers for extending small amounts of protein. Bread crumbs and milk do the bulk of the work here, with scraps of yesterday's roast standing in for a meat course; the same logic produced stuffed onions, stuffed tomatoes and stuffed cabbage leaves in the vegetable chapters of household manuals of the period. Thrift cookery of this kind was a staple of promotional and institutional cookbooks, and the airy suggestion that "tomatoes and rice make an excellent filling" is characteristic of the genre: the vessel is the recipe, and the contents are whatever the household has.