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Stuffed Peppers

A dish of sweet peppers filled with seasoned ground meat, cooked in a pan with flour, butter, tomato, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peppers

  1. Cut the stems and tops from the sweet peppers and remove the seeds.

  2. Fill the peppers with ground meat and season to taste.

Cook

  1. Cover the bottom of a deep pan with flour, adding salt and pepper.

  2. Stand the peppers in the pan and place a small piece of butter on top of each pepper.

  3. Add 1 cup of tomato around each pepper in the pan.

  4. When the flour is brown, add stock or gravy and continue to baste until the peppers are soft.

  5. Cover the pan to prevent the peppers from drying out.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Meat + tomatotop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,438 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Ground meat
Forms the filling that cooks inside each pepper and adds savoury flavour.
Flour
Browns in the pan to add colour and a toasted, savoury flavour to the base.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the tops of the peppers brown as they cook.
Tomato
Adds moisture and acidity that flavours the sauce around the peppers.
Stock or gravy
Adds liquid for basting, keeping the peppers moist and softening them as they cook.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour must brown properly before the liquid goes in, since it builds colour and flavour in the base. If it is added too early or left too long it can taste raw or burn, so watch the colour closely.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, meat, flour, 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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