RED PEPPERS.
The big, green "bell peppers" are now as com mon as any vegetable, and mild enough to make a most agreeable addition to salads. But their ancestors, and some of their near relatives, are hot as fire, due to a bitter juice that is especially strong in the seeds and the tissues to which they are attached. Cutting out the white "cores" re moves the burning parts, and the walls of the pods are ready to eat, raw or cooked. They "go with" tomatoes particularly well, each adding a good flavor to the other when stewed together. When ripened, the bell peppers are red and hotter in taste than before, but they are milder still than the little varieties. Peppers seem to be hottest in the smallest kinds. Strangely, it would seem, people of hot countries like peppery foods. A hot stomach may act as a counter-irritant to the hot climate.
The tiny, slim peppers of Tabasco sauce are the hottest of the hot, cylindrical peppers. One of these furnishes the Cayenne pepper of commerce.
The thin, red shell is ground when dry, and used sparingly as a condiment. It is much more whole some than black pepper.
Chillies, or Chiles, are group names applied to the little, hot peppers so universally used in hot countries to season stews and other savory dishes. One sees strings of these little red fingers hang ing up to dry over the entrances to houses and shops in Mexico and the south of Europe. The fiery temperament of the Latin races may demand fiery condiments; or it may be the result of such appetite. We Northerners would not like to spare the dash of red pepper in our salads, the piquant flavor of the fresh red peppers in mixed pickles, nor the mild vegetable developed by plant breeders as large as an apple, and enjoyable eaten out of the hand, like an apple.
Paprika is a red powder made of the dry pods of mild, sweet peppers. It can be used far more freely than the pungent Cayenne.