Peppers stuffed with rice, mince, and herbs

Italian food is unimaginable without the pepper, the tomato, the potato and the courgette, and Italy had none of them until about five hundred years ago.

All four came from the Americas, arrived in Europe during the sixteenth century, and were regarded with deep suspicion for a very long time afterwards. Tomatoes were grown as ornamental curiosities and widely believed to be poisonous, which was not entirely unreasonable given the family they belong to. Peppers came through Spain and spread slowly northwards. The idea that any of this constitutes ancient and eternal Italian tradition is about as accurate as the idea that Britain has always had tea.

What is genuinely old is the technique. Stuffing a vegetable and baking it is Mediterranean cooking at its most fundamental, and it long predates the arrival of anything from across the Atlantic. The Greeks and the Ottomans had been doing it to vine leaves, courgettes and onions for centuries before a pepper ever reached Naples. When peppers finally turned up they simply slotted into a habit that already existed, which is generally how a cuisine absorbs a new ingredient: not by inventing something, but by feeding it to a method that was already hungry.

For anybody cooking alone, a stuffed pepper is a remarkably well-designed object. It is a complete meal, portioned in advance, arriving in a container that is also part of the food, and it holds together in a lunchbox better than anything here that is not a sandwich.

The filling is mince, rice and herbs. The rice goes in raw, because it finishes cooking in the oven by absorbing the juices coming off the meat and the pepper itself, and that absorption is where most of the flavour ends up.