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Stuffed Green Peppers

A baked dish of green peppers stuffed with a mixture of buttered onion, minced ham, garlic, bread, and spices, topped with breadcrumbs and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the peppers

  1. Parboil one dozen green peppers.

  2. Remove the skins from the parboiled peppers.

  3. Cut off the tops of the peppers.

  4. Clean the insides of the peppers and discard the seeds.

  5. Chop the remaining dozen raw peppers very fine.

  6. Set the chopped peppers aside.

Make the filling

  1. In a skillet, melt the butter.

  2. Lightly brown the minced onion in the melted butter.

  3. Add the chopped peppers and minced ham to the skillet.

  4. Cook the mixture until almost mashed.

  5. Stir in the minced garlic.

  6. Cook until the peppers are well cooked.

  7. Add the wet bread to the skillet.

  8. Season the mixture with salt, pepper, and cayenne.

  9. Let the mixture brown.

Stuff and bake

  1. Stuff the mixture into the prepared peppers.

  2. Sprinkle bread crumbs over the stuffed peppers.

  3. Dot the tops with butter.

  4. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until browned.

  5. Serve hot.

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 and provide the main bulk and vegetal flavour of the filling.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty depth to the filling.
Bread
Soaks up moisture and binds the filling so it holds its shape when stuffed.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the topping brown in the oven.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth when browned in butter.

The step that matters

Squeeze the wet bread thoroughly. Excess water from the bread would dilute the filling and make it soggy, so the mixture would not hold together or brown well in the oven.

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.

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