Bell peppers are bullies. They are also ubiquitous. And, worse, they dominate—both visually and gastronomically—anything they share a plate with. Recently I was served an otherwise subtle Indian meal in which three different dishes were garishly garnished with horizontal sections of the things. Airline food is particularly disturbing, not to say hazardous, for me. On one flight I was handed a stir-fried diced-chicken concoction rendered both offensive to the eye and abhorrent to the palate by tiny squares of raw red, yellow, and green bell peppers. And, feeling vulnerable during a stay in the hospital, I was subjected to the ultimate assault upon my senses—a salad with whacking great uncooked wedges of the vegetal villain on the same tray as a main course that had been decorated with the better part of a whole green pepper! Are they trying to kill me? I wondered. I’ve not yet, thank God, encountered bell peppers in a dessert, but they’re in darn well everything else—soups, salads, mousses, stews, and purées. (I’ve had to renounce kebabs and ratatouille, where their use, though entirely legitimate, is still distasteful to me.)
Another off-putting aspect of the vile vegetable is its outlandish color. Peppers were once either picked when still their immature shade of bright green (about 60 to 80 days after planting) or allowed to stay on the plant longer to ripen and redden. Now they come in ever-weirder hues: canary yellow, Day-Glo orange, and a purple that, if only it were darker, would pass for (a more attractive) black. This ghastly palette inspires bad cooks everywhere to beautify their sinister compositions with circles, strips, or cubes of this would-be food. The most irritating peculiarity of garnish-mania is that those in its grip think the stuff is actually agreeable to eat.
Raw, a bell pepper is nothing less than a mugger. It totally overpowers the flavors of other foods, and if you bite into an uncooked, unpeeled section you risk getting splinters of tough skin between your teeth that only vigorous flossing can remove. It is also indigestible and can be tasted for hours after you’ve been foolish enough to eat it. (It’s hard to believe that this is the same vegetable—fruit really, since it contains all those horrid seeds—that can be so aromatic and taste so good when you blister its skin and peel it.)
It doesn’t surprise me one bit that bell peppers are Solanaceae, the same family as deadly nightshade. All peppers (except for black peppercorns) are of the genus Capsicum, and the active ingredient, the thing that gives them their kick, is the compound capsaicin, characterized, says the Encyclopaedia Britannica with devastating accuracy, “by acrid vapors and burning taste.”
Now I have nothing against hot, or chile, peppers. When they are cooked, the capsaicin in these adds underlying warmth to some of the best dishes in the world, from Thai curries to spicy southern barbecue sauces. Neither do I have anything against pimientos, the sweet pepper varieties that give Hungarian gulyás and Spanish chorizo their distinctive flavor. I can even tolerate tiny thin slices of raw red or green chile peppers embellishing a green papaya salad or a Thai nam prik (once, in southern Thailand, I had a nam prik so mouth-burningly piquant that the vegetables served for dipping in it were frozen) or any one of a dozen Mexican delicacies.
Hot peppers, unlike bell peppers, are treated with respect. But bell peppers are definitely a second-class food. They have no real raison d’être at all except for being grilled and peeled, used in most gazpachos, or stuffed. Okay, I understand that the last method figures in many cuisines, from the Provençal to the Bulgarian. Stuffed peppers are also one of the few dishes that Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewish cooks have in common. And the stuffings are certainly many and varied, ranging from rice or bread-crumb mixtures to meat and incorporating perfectly nice things like pine nuts and currants.
Still, there are lots of other, much more interesting and desirable vegetables to stuff. Take eggplant, or zucchini, or tomatoes, or the cap of a large mushroom, or even a cabbage leaf. (Gazpacho I concede. It requires peppers raw and unpeeled. But the liquidizer at least renders them unrecognizable.)
Remember, though, that there is one place where the thug of the vegetable kingdom does not belong, ever, especially in his rude, crude version. And that is in the salad bowl. Salad is sacred, and the salad dressing has yet to be invented that can subdue the evil taste (and aftereffects) of raw bell peppers.
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