Skip to main content
Main

Stuffed Peppers

A dish of parboiled green peppers filled with rice, meat, and egg, simmered in tomato sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,395 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peppers

  1. Remove seeds from the peppers and parboil them in boiling water for about 5 minutes.

  2. In a bowl, mix the rice, chopped meat, salt, pepper, allspice, and egg.

  3. Stuff the parboiled peppers with the meat and rice mixture.

Make the sauce and cook

  1. In a pot, heat the lard, add the flour, and let it brown.

  2. Add the strained tomato juice and salt to taste, and cook until combined.

  3. Place the stuffed peppers in the tomato sauce and simmer for about 2 hours on low heat.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Allspice + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,302 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Green peppers
Act as the edible shell that holds the filling while the peppers soften during cooking.
Rice
Absorbs liquid and adds bulk and body to the stuffing.
Chopped meat
Provides savory richness and protein-based texture to the filling.
Egg
Binds the rice and meat mixture so the filling holds together when stuffed.
Lard
Carries the flour's browning and adds fat for a rich sauce base.
Flour
Browns in the hot fat and thickens the tomato sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in lard. Flour must be cooked until it turns golden in the hot fat; this toasts the starch for flavor and removes its raw taste, and it also helps thicken the sauce evenly when the tomato juice is added.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, rice, meat, egg, flour, tomato):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, rice, meat, egg, flour, tomato. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More stuffed peppers recipes

Oyster 12Sweetbread 5Mexican 4Baked 3Pickled 3 See all 64 →

You might also like

Meatless Tomato SoupMeatless Tomato Soup23 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipes