Skip to main content
Main

Stuffed Green Peppers

A savory dish of green peppers filled with a mixture of butter, onion, ham, garlic, bread, and spices, baked until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Stuffed Green Peppers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peppers

  1. Parboil one dozen green peppers, remove skins, cut off the tops, and clean out the insides, discarding seeds.

  2. Chop the remaining peppers very fine.

Make the stuffing

  1. In a pan, melt butter and add half of the minced onion; let it brown slightly.

  2. Add the chopped peppers and minced ham; cook until browned.

  3. Stir in the minced garlic and the wet bread; season with salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper.

  4. Once the stuffing is well browned, remove from heat and stuff the peppers.

Bake and serve

  1. Sprinkle grated bread crumbs on top and add a dot of butter on each pepper.

  2. Bake until browned and serve hot with meats.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Green peppers
Form the edible shell that holds the stuffing and softens during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the onion and peppers brown in the pan.
Bread
Adds body to the stuffing and absorbs moisture as it cooks.
Ham
Contributes savory, salty flavor and browns in the stuffing.
Onion
Builds savory sweetness as it browns in the butter.

The step that matters

Browning the stuffing. The chopped peppers and wet bread release water, so the stuffing must cook long enough for that moisture to evaporate. Otherwise the filling stays soggy and fails to develop browned, savory flavor through the Maillard reaction.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, onion, ham, garlic, bread. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes