‘I Cannot Hear “Stuffed Vegetables” Without Flashbacks’

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.

I recently decided it was time for me, too, to get on the stuffed vegetable beat. (It only took a couple of decades of recovery post my vegetarian spell.) It was late summer, and I was running out of ways to cook squash. Any allotment tender will know the feeling: the delight of the first little speckled courgette, the beauty of the flowers, the wonder that the earth could provide such riches. Then, the second wave of courgettes, then the third, then the panic of stewing, souping, roasting, baking, and pickling through the glut. You end up grating courgette into dishes it has no business being in; smuggling it into cakes, or, as I found myself thinking: “stuff these courgettes”.

So, partly because I wanted to learn how to honour nature’s bounty, and partly because aubergines were yellow-stickered in the shop, I applied myself to the stuffed vegetable arts. For help, I went cap in hand to the cookbooks of the dolma belt – an area of stuffed-vegetable excellence, which maps nicely on to the contours of the Ottoman empire, from the Balkans across Turkiye and Palestine, through West Asia and to Iran. Calling this a region doesn’t exactly make sense – it spans time zones, languages and continents. But across this swath, there has been a Cambrian explosion of stuffed peppers, aubergines, summer squash, courgettes, cabbage and vine leaves. It makes the British stuffed pepper seem like a half-formed thought.

So, I learned a little about texture, construction and contrast. I fried onions and minced beef, and mixed them with spiced maftoul, then spooned this into halved, hollowed-out peppers. I repurposed a few little globe squash, the size of closed fists, and filled them with lamb, bulgur and handfuls of soft herbs. I learned from Palestinian cookbooks (nowhere does stuffed vegetables quite like Palestine) that a special manakra – a long, curved blade, great for coring things and much easier to use than a knife – provides a first line of defence against mid-cook meltdowns. And crucially, I learned that no matter the fateful and seemingly inherent vegetarian-ness of stuffed vegetables over here, meat is probably the best stuffing you can use. So much pain could have been avoided, I think, if the ancestry of British stuffed veg came through the dolma belt, and not through macrobiotic cookbooks.

The downside of all this, of course, is that such dishes take for ever. But now that the evenings are longer and summer FOMO is thankfully done, it’s a good time for such kitchen projects. In previous years, it’s been starting on the Christmas cake or ill-advisedly trying to reverse engineer a Mr Kipling fondant fancy. This year, it’s the seemingly modest – and actually momentous – challenge of stuffed veg dishes which, under ideal circumstances, require an entire production line of volunteer peelers, corers, rollers, folders, idlers, pot watchers and gossipers to produce.

Top of the list: Kurdish yapraxi silq – the Noah’s ark of stuffed vegetables: an elaborate layering of simmered, translucent, onion layer sheaths; tiger-striped and hollowed out courgettes; aubergines and tomatoes, their bellies gouged; and rolled up swiss chard leaves. I found the recipe in Pary Baban’s delightful Nandên. I’ve already made one of her other yaprax (stuffed vegetable) recipes: aubergine and cucumber filled with rice and minced lamb, then – gorgeously, surgically – sewn shut with needle and thread. This is the level we’re at. I will report back when I have finished constructing this yapraxi silq, in this lifetime or the next.