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Stuffed Peppers (Chop very fine sufficient)
Chop very fine sufficient roast chicken or veal to make one cupful. Add to it one and one-half cupfuls of bread crumbs soaked in milk, one tomato skinned and cut fine, one-half of a medium-sized onion chopped fine, one heaping tablespoonful of butter melted, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley, one raw egg, and one-half teaspoonful of salt. Stuff the prepared peppers with this mixture, set them upright in a baking dish, pour in any good stock to the depth of one-half inch, and bake for half an hour in a good oven.
A straightforward use for leftover roast meat, written for a cook who already knew what "prepared peppers" meant. A few gaps need filling.
- Preparing the peppersThe recipe assumes the peppers have already been prepared elsewhere: tops cut off, seeds and membranes removed, and (in most books of this type) the shells briefly parboiled. Without a parboil the pepper walls will still be firm after only half an hour in the oven.
- "A good oven"Read this as 375-400F. Hot enough to set the egg-bound filling and brown the tops, not so hot that the stock in the dish evaporates before the peppers soften.
- Bread crumbs soaked in milkUse dry or stale crumbs, not fresh packaged ones, and soak in just enough milk to moisten. Squeeze out the excess or the filling will slump.
- The egg is structuralOne raw egg binds a fairly wet mixture. It cooks through in the oven, so there is no raw-egg concern, but do not leave it out or the stuffing will not hold when the peppers are cut.
- Cooked meat onlyThe recipe calls for roast chicken or veal, already cooked. Half an hour at this temperature will not safely cook raw ground meat packed into a pepper; use leftovers as written.
- The stock in the dishHalf an inch of stock steams the peppers from below and keeps the bottoms from scorching. Check partway through and top up if it has cooked away.
- YieldThe filling fills four to six medium peppers, depending on size. Serve two per person as a light main, one as a side.
Stuffed peppers of this kind belong to the American table of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when sweet bell peppers had become reliable market produce and household books began treating them as a vessel rather than a seasoning. The filling here is essentially a bread-and-meat forcemeat, the same economical mixture that went into stuffed tomatoes, stuffed onions and croquettes in the same books — a way of turning Sunday's roast into Tuesday's dinner without it reading as leftovers. The instruction to bake in "a good oven" is typical of the period, when cooks judged heat by hand and experience rather than by a dial.