The Virtues of Green Bell Peppers

Most cooks I know despise green bell peppers. They deride them as bitter, virtually inedible versions of their older, sweeter red or yellow or orange selves. In fact, an article in this very space some five years ago chronicled the one-sided tug of war between the many detractors and few fans of these savory peppers.

Me? I love them. But I admit that my reasons are as personal as culinary.

My infatuation began in the small Iowa farming town where I grew up. The soil there was black. Not dark brown, black. Like licorice. And that old cliché that anything you stuck into the ground would grow? Completely true.

I know this because of my father’s enormous garden. Tucked away on the upper part of our lot, it held row after row of onions, tomatoes, Swiss chard, sweet corn. And of course, bell peppers.

I seldom paid any attention to the garden. Who cared about vegetables, anyway? But every once in a while, desperate for distraction on a hot summer day, I would wander up past the plum thicket and my brother’s homemade pole-vaulting pit to see what was there.

Sometimes my friend Eddy, who lived just a couple of blocks away, would join me. Eddy didn’t talk much about his feelings. When I ran into him at the drugstore soda fountain the day after his father died and told him I was sorry, he glared at me, said, “What for?” and refused to speak to me for a week.

So on those long afternoons, when it seemed that nothing would ever happen in this little town where everyone knew everyone, we would sit silently on the ground, picking and eating fat green bell peppers like apples. Hot from the sun, almost lush but subtly bitter, they were curiously comforting, their crisp complexity somehow taking me to another place. Other cooks are welcome to banish green peppers from the plates. For me, they will always taste of the conflicted languor of those long summer days and the occasional comfort of small things. And really, what more can a vegetable do?