It has taken me decades to get over the vegetarian cookbooks of my past
It would be unwise to overstate things, the world being as it is, but what happened in the UK with stuffed peppers is a tragedy. You know the ones I mean: traffic light bell peppers stuffed with a cupboard raid of rice, breadcrumbs, lentils, nuts and veg – 70s stuffed peppers. The kind you might find in a wholefoods cookbook, cheerfully distended and jaunty of cap, with the physiognomy of PC Plod. I used to make them at university sometimes, my sensibilities being, as ever, several decades out of touch. I think I was trying to channel the vegetarian cookbooks my parents once had – in the years before discovering pesto, these peppers were the vegetarian’s lot. The recipes I concocted bore things like buckwheat groats, curly leaf parsley and yeast extract. To this day, I cannot hear “stuffed vegetables” without flashbacks to such peppers and their generous cargo of junk.
It’s a shame, because stuffed vegetables so obviously do not have to be this way. Take chiles rellenos: think about what it takes not just to stuff a poblano, but to blacken it over flame, then to peel off its skin, fill with cheese, secure the seam with a toothpick, coat in flour, dip in fluffy whisked egg, and fry until the batter is crisp and puffed.
