Eating While Poor in the Mississippi Delta
Molasses flavored rice and meat stuffed bell peppers in tomato sauce, recipe below
Around the time of the Great Depression, tenant farmers experienced a quasi-slave-like existence in which they received food rations from large planters. A 1928 Mississippi Agricultural Experiment Station report on African American tenant farmers in the largely cotton producing Yazoo-Mississippi Delta says that many “like molasses and eat a great deal of it especially in fall, winter, and early spring.” Most farmers also raised pigs and cultivated gardens with greens, peas, all kinds of peppers, and tomatoes.
Molasses Flavored Rice and Meat Stuffed Bell Peppers Recipe
Ingredients
1 3/4 cup water
1 cup brown basmati rice
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 pound vegan or regular mild sausage
1/2 vegan ground beef or regular beef
1 16 oz can vegan or meat no bean chile
2 cups whole tomatoes
2 cups diced tomatoes
2 cups tomato sauce
1 8 oz can tomato paste
2 tablespoons or more of molasses
1 teaspoon of anise seeds
1/2 teaspoon fresh cilantro
1 tablespoon majorem
1 tablespoon sage
6 or 7 bell peppers
Method
Cook some wet rice with salt and butter, but be sure it doesn’t try out. While cooking the rice, sauté sausage and ground beef together in a skillet until brown then add chile, tomatoes, sauce and paste combining the ingredients with the meat in a crock pot on high then turn down to low after all the contents to really cooking. Then add the molasses, anise, marjorem, sage and cilantro into the crock pot and stir well and add more molasses to sweeten it if you like. Cook the stuffing in the crock pot well. Preheat oven to 325 while you are stuffing the peppers, careful because the stuffing will be hot. Place the stuffed peppers in a large (preferable glass) baking dish. Take the entire remainder of the stuffing mix and pour it over the bell peppers in the pan. Bake for about 10 minutes. Over cooking will dry out the sauce - or worse, blacken the rice.
