Name: Stuffed Green Peppers
Ingredients: 4 green peppers; 2 tablespoons oil or fat; filling for bread dumplings (as per your choice); flour (for thickening); water (as needed)

Why it works: Pepper and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,964 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Stuffed Green Peppers

Ingredients

4 green peppers
2 tablespoons oil or fat
filling for bread dumplings (as per your choice)
flour (for thickening)
water (as needed)

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 and fill

Cut off the stem end of the peppers and remove the seeds.
If desired, mix the inner part of the peppers with the filling before stuffing.
Fill the peppers with a filling similar to bread dumplings.

Bake

Place the stuffed peppers in a baking dish and drizzle with oil or fat.
Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for about 50 minutes.

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.

Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50,459 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Bread + flourtop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together10,383 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Bread and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 filling and softens as it bakes.
Oil or fat: Carries heat across the pepper surface and helps it brown and taste rich.
Flour: Thickens any liquid in the dish so it becomes a light, cohesive sauce.

“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.