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Stuffed Peppers (May be boiled stuffed or baked)
The peppers may be boiled, stuffed or baked, and may be served without sauce. Cut off the stems and take out the seeds and the insides. After this, put the peppers in boiling water and let them boil twenty minutes. Eight good-sized sweet peppers will require about three cupfuls of stuffing. Take a pint of cooked meat, chopped fine; veal or chicken is better than anything else for the purpose. A mixture of half roast chicken and half veal is nice. Add to the chopped meat a cupful of soft bread crumbs. Moisten the whole with a cupful of stock, or one of water may be used. Season the forcemeat with an even teaspoonful of salt, a teaspoonful of pepper, half a teaspoonful of summer savory and of thyme and half teaspoonful of sage. Do not replace the covers on the peppers, but sprinkle fine bread crumbs over them at the end where the stuffing is exposed, and add bits of butter. Put the peppers on a buttered pan and let them bake twenty minutes, or until well browned. Serve these peppers with a roast of beef or with chicken. They are a wholesome and excellent summer vegetable, stimulating digestion in the languid heat of summer.
A leftovers dish dressed up as a vegetable course: cooked meat, crumbs and stock packed into blanched sweet peppers. Two numbers in the original need adjusting, and one is missing entirely.
- The twenty-minute boilTwenty minutes in boiling water leaves the peppers slumped and waterlogged, and they then get twenty more in the oven. Three to five minutes of blanching is enough to soften the walls; drain them cut-side down before filling.
- No oven temperature is givenThe book assumes a cook who reads her range. For twenty minutes to browned crumbs, use 400F. At 350F the tops will still be pale at that point.
- A teaspoonful of pepperThat is a full teaspoon of pepper against a pint of meat, and it reads as a slip or as period taste. A quarter teaspoon is closer to modern expectation; season the forcemeat and taste it before it goes into the shells.
- Cooked meat means leftoversThe recipe is built for the remains of a roast. A pint of finely chopped cooked chicken and veal is roughly 10 oz by weight; cooked pork or turkey substitutes without complaint. If you are cooking meat specially, poach it and use the poaching liquid as the stock.
- Soft crumbs and fine crumbs are different thingsThe cupful worked into the stuffing should be soft fresh crumbs, which absorb the stock. The crumbs sprinkled on top should be dry and fine so they brown. Using dry crumbs inside gives a pasty filling.
- Moisten, do not soakA cupful of liquid to a pint of meat and a cup of crumbs is generous. Add it gradually until the mixture just holds together when pressed; the peppers release their own moisture in the oven.
- The herbsSummer savory, thyme and sage were common in American stuffings of this period. The quantities suggest dried herbs; if using fresh, treble the quantity.
- YieldEight peppers, one apiece, as a side dish with roast beef or chicken as the text suggests. Two each make a light main course.
Sweet peppers were still a somewhat regional American vegetable at the turn of the century, common in market gardens near the cities and in the South but far from universal, which may be why the writer bothers to argue for them as "a wholesome and excellent summer vegetable" that stimulates digestion in hot weather. The dish itself belongs to the large family of late-Victorian forcemeat cookery: a stuffing of chopped cooked meat bound with bread and stock, the same mixture that filled croquettes, timbales and rissoles, here given a vegetable case instead of a crumb coating. Household books of the era often treated such recipes as thrift instruction, a respectable way to bring Sunday's roast back to the table on Tuesday.