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Stuffed Peppers

Sweet peppers filled with cold chicken or veal, bread crumbs, and seasonings, baked and served with toast and brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Cut a slice from the stem end of the sweet peppers and remove the seeds.

  2. Parboil the peppers for 15 minutes.

Make the filling

  1. Mix equal parts of cold chicken or veal with softened bread crumbs.

  2. Season the mixture with onion juice, coarse sea salt, and black pepper.

Bake and serve

  1. Fill the peppers with the mixture and cover with buttered bread crumbs.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  3. Serve on toast with brown gravy.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet peppers
Hold the filling and soften as they cook, becoming tender enough to eat.
Cold chicken or veal
Provides the main meaty body and savory flavor of the filling.
Softened bread crumbs
Bind the meat into a cohesive filling and absorb moisture so it stays moist.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the buttered crumb topping brown in the oven.
Onion juice
Adds aromatic onion flavor to the filling without bulk.

The step that matters

Parboil the peppers. Parboiling softens the pepper walls before baking. Skipping or shortening it leaves them tough and raw-tasting, while overcooking makes them collapse and lose their shape.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, chicken, bread, butter):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, chicken, bread, butter. 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.

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