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Peppers as a Vegetable
Select for this purpose sweet Spanish peppers. This is a pepper similar to the old-fashioned bull-nosed pepper, but it is larger and milder in flavor. A simple and satisfactory way to prepare these peppers, as a vegetable, is to plunge them in hot water and let them simmer for ten minutes. Drain them, cut off the stems and cut a slice out of the stem end and scoop out the seeds and insides of the peppers. Stuff the peppers with a nice sausage meat, or prepare a forcemeat of lean veal and fat pork, in the proportion of one-quarter pound of fat salt pork and three-quarters of a pound of lean veal, all ground together. Add an even tablespoonful of salt, half teaspoonful of pepper, a teaspoonful of chopped parsley. Mix well and use. After filling the peppers with the forcemeat, replace the covers and oil the peppers well. Set them in a baking pan and bake them thoroughly for thirty minutes and serve with a rich brown sauce around them.
A straightforward stuffed-pepper recipe from the era when sweet peppers were still being introduced to American cooks as a vegetable in their own right. Two things need attention: the salt, and the oven temperature the original never gives.
- The peppers"Sweet Spanish" and "bull-nosed" are both blocky sweet peppers of the sort a supermarket now sells as a green bell pepper, though the recipe treats the Spanish as the larger, milder of the two. Choose squat, thick-walled ones that will stand upright; roughly six medium peppers should take the pound of forcemeat.
- Cut the lid firstThe recipe simmers the peppers whole, then tells you to cut and seed them. It is easier to cut the lid and scoop the seeds before blanching, which also lets water drain out instead of collecting inside.
- The blanchTen minutes at a simmer softens the walls so they finish tender in the oven. Thin-walled peppers may need less, perhaps five minutes, or they risk going too soft to fill.
- SaltA level tablespoon of salt is roughly 18 g against one pound of meat, and the fat salt pork brings more. That is well above what modern forcemeat recipes generally call for. Start with less -- around two teaspoons -- fry a small patty, and taste before filling.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven term. Around 350F for the stated thirty minutes suits a stuffed pepper; the filling should reach 160F at the centre, which is what matters with ground veal and pork.
- "Oil the peppers well"This means brushing the outsides with oil or melted fat so the skins do not dry and wrinkle. A little water or stock in the bottom of the pan helps as well.
- Sausage meat insteadThe sausage-meat alternative is the quicker route and will need little or no extra seasoning, since bulk breakfast sausage is already salted and peppered.
- The brown sauceA "rich brown sauce" here means an espagnole or a well-reduced pan gravy, not a thin jus. Poured around rather than over, as the original specifies, so the pepper lids stay visible.
- YieldSix stuffed peppers, one apiece as a main course with the sauce, or half a pepper as a side.
Sweet peppers were a comparatively late arrival on the ordinary American table. Through much of the nineteenth century peppers meant pickles and condiments; recipes that treat them as a vegetable to be cooked and served hot become noticeably more common toward the end of the century. The "bull-nose" the writer invokes as the familiar reference point is an older American name for the blocky sweet pepper, and "Spanish" signals the larger, milder sort sold under that name. The filling follows a common kitchen pattern: a forcemeat of lean veal cut with fat salt pork in a three-to-one ratio, a proportion also found in quenelles, terrines and stuffings of the period.