Baked Peppers
Select six sweet bell peppers (green); cut the stem ends almost around, leaving a hinge; take out the seeds; chop fine three medium-sized ripe tomatoes; also a small quantity of cold fresh meat; add a few bread crumbs; have a hot skillet in which has been heated a teaspoonful of olive oil or lard; turn in the mixture and stir until it is hot through. Add a teaspoonful of butter, pinch of cayenne, salt and some of the green pepper seeds; fill the peppers with this; place in a pan just large enough to hold them upright, pour a cup of water into the pan, close down the tops, bake about twenty minutes. Serve hot. This is easily made, economical and good.
A tidy way to use up a small amount of cooked meat. The recipe assumes you know your own oven, so a few numbers help.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 375F. Twenty minutes is enough to heat the filling through and soften the peppers slightly, but if you want them fully tender allow 35-40 minutes and add water to the pan as it evaporates.
- "Cold fresh meat"This means leftover cooked meat — roast beef, lamb, pork or chicken — not raw. "Fresh" here is set against salted or smoked. Chop it fine; roughly 3/4 to 1 cup for six peppers.
- The pepper seedsAdding "some of the green pepper seeds" back to the filling is deliberate, but sweet bell seeds are not hot; at most they contribute a faint bitterness. Skip them if you dislike the texture and lean on the cayenne instead.
- Lids and steamThe cut-and-hinge lid plus a cup of water in the pan turns the oven into a steamer, which is what keeps the filling moist in twenty minutes. Use a pan snug enough that the peppers stay upright and do not tip and spill.
- Filling is already cookedEverything goes into the skillet hot before it is stuffed, so the oven time is about the peppers, not the meat. Season the mixture assertively in the pan and taste it there — you cannot correct it later.
- Bread crumbsThe recipe says only "a few," and their job is to bind the tomato juice. Dry crumbs, a few tablespoons, are the safest reading; fresh crumbs work but absorb less, so add them gradually until the mixture holds together without being pasty.
- YieldSix peppers serve three as a light main course or six as a side.
Stuffed peppers appear in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward. The framing here is pure late-Victorian household economy: a dish built around "a small quantity of cold fresh meat," the remains of a roast stretched with tomato and crumbs, and the closing note that it is "economical and good" is the selling point rather than an afterthought.