Capsicum annuum var. annuum, Grossum Group (the blocky sweet or bell pepper) and the elongated sweet groups (Italian corno, Hungarian TV paprika, Spanish piquillo, Balkan kapia); together with the non-pungent forms of Capsicum chinense (ají dulce, cachucha, ajicito) of the Caribbean and northern South America
Origin: Mesoamerica, where Capsicum annuum was domesticated, and the Amazon basin and northern South America, where the separate species Capsicum chinense gave the sweet ají dulce; the blocky sweet bell itself was selected in Europe after 1493
The bell pepper is the chilli that lost its fire, and the whole of its story turns on that single fact. It is not a separate species from the cayenne or the jalapeño but the same one, Capsicum annuum, and what divides the sweet pepper from the hot is a mutation at one gene. The Pun1 locus governs the enzyme that builds capsaicin in the placental tissue of the fruit; where a recessive, non-functional copy is inherited from both parents, the plant makes no capsaicin at all, and the pepper is sweet. Everything else about the sweet pepper follows from that: because it carries no heat, it can be eaten in quantity as a vegetable rather than in pinches as a spice, and so it was bred for size, for wall thickness, and for flesh, until it became the blocky, hollow, glossy fruit of the modern kitchen.
The species was domesticated in Mesoamerica, and the archaeological record of the Tehuacán valley and the Mexican highlands carries Capsicum annuum back some eight thousand years. But it is important to be exact about what Mexico did and did not do: the peoples of Mesoamerica domesticated the species and selected it, overwhelmingly, for pungency, breeding the great family of chillies on which their cooking rests. The large, thick-walled, wholly sweet pepper is not a Mexican creation. It was after 1493, in the gardens and market plots of Spain, Italy, the Balkans, and Hungary, that European growers found the non-pungent mutants, liked them, and bred them up into a vegetable; the bell pepper as the world now knows it is a European selection from an American plant.
Because of this, the sweet pepper has one species but several distinct cultivar traditions still current in the kitchen, and they are not interchangeable: the blocky Grossum bell of the supermarket; the long, tapered, thin-walled Italian corno di toro and the Hungarian TV paprika; the small, squat, sweet Spanish piquillo of Lodosa; the fleshy Balkan kapia grown for roasting; and the dried, brittle peperone crusco of Senise. Beside all of these stands a genuinely separate lineage: the non-pungent forms of Capsicum chinense, an Amazonian species quite distinct from C. annuum, whose sweet, aromatic little fruits are the ají dulce, cachucha, or ajicito that flavour the sofrito of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Venezuela. They carry all the fruity perfume of the habanero, their fiery cousin, and none of its heat.
The sweet pepper's voyage is the same voyage as the chilli's, made at the same moment and in the same ships, and yet it became a different journey because the sweet pepper travelled as a vegetable and the chilli as a spice. When Columbus carried Capsicum back to Spain in 1493, what he brought was the whole variable species, hot fruits and mild ones together, and it was in the kitchen gardens and monastery plots of Iberia that European growers began to notice, keep, and multiply the plants that bore no heat. Because a spice can be dried, ground, and shipped in a sack, the pungent chilli raced along the Portuguese and Spanish trade routes to Africa, India, and the Far East within a few decades. The sweet pepper, being watery and perishable and useful only fresh, moved far more slowly and stayed, for its first two centuries, a Mediterranean and Central European vegetable.
Within that world it was taken up with enthusiasm and bred into local shapes. Spain raised the piquillo of Navarre and the sweet pimiento that would be dried and ground for pimentón; Italy made the corno di toro and the peperonata of the summer table, and in Basilicata dried the thin-walled peperone di Senise into the brittle crusco. Carried east by Ottoman power, the pepper reached Anatolia and passed with the Turkish armies up the Danube into Hungary and across the Balkans, where it found the soils and the long hot summers that suited it best; the Hungarians made it their national vegetable and their national spice at once, and the Serbs and Macedonians built around the roasted kapia the great autumn ritual of ajvar. Spanish and Portuguese ships took it south across the Mediterranean into the Maghreb, where the roasted and peeled pepper became the basis of a whole family of cooked salads, and down the Atlantic coast to West Africa, where blended red peppers became the foundation of the Yoruba stew base.
Its return to the Americas came by a separate road. The sweet Capsicum chinense of Amazonia, the ají dulce, spread through the Caribbean, where it joined onion, garlic, and culantro in the sofrito that is the flavour base of the entire Hispanic Caribbean; and from the Spanish Caribbean that habit of building a dish on a fried aromatic base travelled to Louisiana, where the French mirepoix was reworked with the local sweet pepper in place of the carrot to make the holy trinity of Creole and Cajun cooking. In the twentieth century the bell pepper became at last a global vegetable, carried into Chinese stir-frying and the cooking of half of Asia, and, most decisively, into the glasshouses of the Netherlands, whose hydroponic industry now supplies much of the world with the year-round red, yellow, and orange peppers that no market before the nineteen-eighties could have offered.
The bell pepper is now one of the most widely grown vegetables on earth, and one of the very few whose modern form owes as much to horticultural technology as to cookery. China is by a wide margin the largest producer, followed by Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, and Spain; but the trade that shaped the pepper on the northern European shelf is Dutch. The glasshouse growers of the Westland, working hydroponically under glass and lamps, turned the bell pepper into a year-round crop of uniform size and brilliant colour, and it is to them that the familiar traffic-light trio of green, yellow, and red owes its ubiquity. The colours are not varieties but stages: a green pepper is simply an unripe one, and left on the plant it will turn yellow, orange, red, or purple according to its cultivar, growing sweeter and richer in vitamin C as it goes.
In the kitchen the sweet pepper does three quite distinct jobs. Fresh and raw it is a salad and crudité vegetable, crisp and watery and mild. Cooked slowly with oil, onion, and tomato it collapses into the great family of Mediterranean pepper stews: the peperonata of Italy, the pisto of Spain, the piperade of the Basque country, the lecsó of Hungary, the chakchouka and taktouka of the Maghreb. And roasted until the skin blisters and lifts, then peeled, it becomes something else entirely, silky and smoky and intensely sweet, the basis of the Balkan ajvar, the Catalan escalivada, the Tunisian mechouia, and a hundred marinated antipasti. Its hollow shape invites a fourth use, as a vessel: stuffed peppers, filled with rice and meat and baked in tomato sauce, are a dish of the Ottoman world, the Balkans, Iran, Hungary, and, by way of European emigration, of the United States.
Alongside the fresh vegetable, the dried and ground sweet pepper is a major spice in its own right: the sweet paprika of Hungary and the pimentón of Spain are both made from non-pungent cultivars, and they are the colouring and the backbone of goulash, paprikash, chorizo, and a great deal of Iberian and Central European cooking. And in the Hispanic Caribbean the small sweet ají dulce, a wholly different species, remains the irreplaceable aromatic of sofrito. From a mutation that switched off a single enzyme, the sweet pepper has become salad, stew, sauce, spice, and vessel across most of the world's kitchens.
Historical Journey of Bell Pepper
The Tehuacán Valley & Highland Mexico — c. 6000 BCE
Capsicum annuum, the species that would give the world both the chilli and the sweet pepper, was domesticated in Mesoamerica, and the desiccated remains recovered from the caves of the Tehuacán valley in Puebla carry its cultivation back some eight thousand years. It is worth being exact about what was accomplished here and what was not. The peoples of Mesoamerica took a small, erect, fiercely pungent wild berry and bred from it the entire family of chillies upon which their cooking rests, selecting overwhelmingly for heat, for aroma, and for the qualities that suit a fruit destined to be dried, smoked, and ground. The large, thick-fleshed, wholly sweet pepper was not among their creations. The mutation that makes a pepper sweet, a broken copy of the gene at the Pun1 locus that halts the manufacture of capsaicin, must have arisen in Mexican fields as it arises anywhere, but a heatless chilli was of little interest to cooks who valued the plant precisely for its fire, and such plants were not multiplied. Mexico therefore gave the world the species and the genetic raw material, and it is the origin of the bell pepper in the strict botanical sense; but the blocky sweet vegetable itself would be selected and bred an ocean away, in the gardens of Europe, after 1493.
The Amazon Basin & Northern South America — c. 4000 BCE
A second and quite separate sweet pepper came from a second and quite separate species. Capsicum chinense, despite a botanical name that is a plain error (it was described in 1776 from specimens received out of China and assumed to have grown there), is an Amazonian plant, domesticated in the lowlands of northern South America and carried by the Arawak and Carib peoples northward through the Guianas and out into the islands of the Caribbean. It is the species of the habanero and the Scotch bonnet, and it is the most aromatic of all the cultivated capsicums, carrying a floral, apricot-like perfume that C. annuum cannot match. Amongst its many domesticated forms are non-pungent ones, carrying the full perfume and none of the heat: the small, squat, wrinkled fruits known through the Hispanic Caribbean and Venezuela as ají dulce, cachucha, or ajicito. These are not bell peppers in the botanical sense at all, belonging to a different species and a different domestication, yet they occupy exactly the same place in the kitchen, as a sweet aromatic pepper eaten in quantity; and it is upon them, rather than upon any European bell, that the sofrito of the Spanish Caribbean is built.
Navarre, La Mancha & the Spanish Kitchen Garden — c. 1493 CE
Columbus carried Capsicum back to Spain from his first voyage in 1493, and what came ashore was not the chilli or the sweet pepper but the whole variable species, hot fruits and mild ones together. It was in the monastery plots and kitchen gardens of Iberia, over the following century, that the sweet pepper as a vegetable was effectively created: European growers found the plants that bore no heat, kept their seed, and bred them for size and for thickness of flesh, until they had something that could be treated not as a spice but as a vegetable to be eaten in quantity. Spain shaped several of the enduring forms, above all the small, squat, intensely sweet piquillo of Lodosa in Navarre, roasted over wood fires, peeled by hand, and packed in jars, and the sweet pimiento that would be dried and milled into pimentón. In the Spanish kitchen the pepper is fried down with onion, tomato, and courgette into the pisto of La Mancha, roasted with aubergine and onion into the Catalan escalivada, and stuffed with salt cod or meat and napped with a cream of its own juices as piquillos rellenos. From these Spanish gardens the sweet pepper would travel to Italy, to the Ottoman lands, across the Mediterranean to the Maghreb, down the African coast, and eventually to the whole world.
Lisbon & the Alentejo, Portugal — c. 1540 CE
Portugal received the capsicum from neighbouring Spain within a few decades of its arrival in Europe, and did two things with it that shaped the plant’s whole global career. The first was to carry it. Portuguese ships, working the Atlantic coast of Africa, rounding the Cape into the Indian Ocean, and pressing on to Malacca, Macau, and Nagasaki, became the great disseminators of the pepper, and it was Portuguese traders rather than Spanish who planted it at Elmina and along the Guinea coast, who landed it at Goa, who introduced it to the China seas, and who took it across the Atlantic to their own colony of Brazil. A very large share of the world’s pepper-eating traditions, from West African stews to Goan curries to Sichuan cooking, trace back through a Portuguese hull. The second was to make of the sweet pepper something wholly Portuguese. In the hot, dry Alentejo, the great plain south of the Tagus, ripe red peppers are layered with coarse salt in an earthenware crock, left for days until they soften and give up their brine, then pounded with garlic and olive oil into massa de pimentão, a thick, brick-red, faintly fermented paste. It is the defining seasoning of Alentejano cooking, rubbed over pork before it meets the pan and stirred into stews and soups; its most celebrated outing is carne de porco à alentejana, in which pork marinated in the paste is cooked with clams. Beside it the sweet pepper colours the caldeirada of the coast and the pepper-and-onion refogado on which Portuguese cooking is built.
Naples, Basilicata & Southern Italy — c. 1550 CE
Italy took the sweet pepper into the heart of its vegetable cookery and bred it long and tapering rather than blocky, giving the corno di toro, the 'bull's horn', and the friggitello or peperoncino verde that is fried whole and eaten by the handful. The pepper arrived in the sixteenth century, was grown first as a curiosity in the botanical gardens of Padua and Pisa, and by the seventeenth century had settled into the cooking of the south, where the long hot summers suit it. Its central dish is the peperonata, in which peppers are stewed slowly with onion, tomato, and olive oil until they collapse into something sweet, silky, and faintly acidic, eaten hot as a vegetable, cold as an antipasto, and at room temperature stuffed into bread the following day. Basilicata gave the pepper its most singular Italian form: the peperone di Senise, a thin-walled sweet pepper strung in garlands to dry in the sun and then flash-fried for seconds in hot oil, when it puffs, darkens, and turns as brittle as a crisp, becoming the peperone crusco that is crumbled over pasta, beans, and salt cod across the region. Between the stewed and the dried, the Italian sweet pepper spans the whole range of what the vegetable can do.
Anatolia & the Ottoman Table — c. 1600 CE
The pepper reached the Ottoman lands through Mediterranean trade in the sixteenth century and was absorbed with remarkable speed into a cuisine already expert in the stuffing of vegetables. Anatolia grows sweet peppers of every shape, the long pale çarliston, the fat green dolmalık grown expressly for stuffing, and the sweet red peppers dried and milled into the pul biber and the deep red pepper pastes, biber salçası, that are as fundamental to the Turkish store cupboard as tomato purée. The pepper's supreme Ottoman expression is the dolma, and biber dolması, peppers hollowed and packed with rice, onion, pine nuts, currants, and herbs and simmered slowly until the flesh is silky, belongs to the great family of stuffed vegetables that the palace kitchens of Istanbul refined into an art; made with meat it is a hot main dish, and made without it, in the zeytinyağlı manner with olive oil and served cold, it is one of the finest things on the Turkish meze table. From Anatolia the sweet pepper travelled onward with Ottoman power, north up the Danube into Hungary and west across the Balkans, where it would become a national vegetable twice over.
Szeged, Kalocsa & the Hungarian Plain — c. 1620 CE
No nation has taken the sweet pepper so completely to itself as Hungary, and it arrived there as an enemy's plant: carried up the Danube by the Ottoman armies and their followers during the occupation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, grown first in the gardens of the Turks and then by the Hungarian peasantry, and only slowly admitted to the tables of the gentry. The hot plains around Szeged and Kalocsa proved ideal, and Hungarian growers did something decisive with the plant: over generations they selected out the pungency, breeding sweet, thick, deep-red cultivars expressly for grinding, so that the paprika of Hungary is made not from chillies but from sweet peppers, and its famous mildness is a deliberate agricultural achievement rather than an accident. The powder became the national spice and the colour of the national cuisine. Beside it the fresh pepper became the national vegetable, above all as lecsó, the summer stew of sliced sweet peppers and tomatoes cooked slowly in lard or oil with onion and a dusting of paprika, eaten as a dish in itself, as a bed for eggs or sausage, and preserved in jars against the winter. Between the powder and the pot, the pepper defines Hungarian cooking more thoroughly than any other ingredient.
Bayonne, the Basque Country & Southern France — c. 1650 CE
The sweet pepper crossed the western Pyrenees from Spain into the French Basque country, where it found a cuisine ready for it and a growing tradition that would make it emblematic. The Basques planted both the sweet green pepper of the region and, at Espelette, the mild red chilli that would become the province's protected pride, and the two together give Basque cooking its characteristic colour and gentle warmth. The pepper's defining dish here is the piperade, whose very name comes from the Basque piper, pepper: sweet green peppers and onions cooked slowly in oil or duck fat until soft, tomatoes added and reduced to a thick, glossy stew, a dusting of Espelette stirred through, and eggs beaten in at the end until the whole is barely set and creamy. Served with a slice of the local dry-cured Bayonne ham, it is the emblem of the Basque table and the model for a whole family of Mediterranean pepper-and-egg dishes. Eastward along the same coast the sweet pepper became one of the co-equal vegetables of Provence, cooked with aubergine, courgette, and tomato into the ratatouille of Nice, so that from the Atlantic to the Alps the peppers of the French south are a summer fixture.
Leskovac & the Balkans — c. 1680 CE
Carried into the Balkans by the same Ottoman expansion that took it to Hungary, the sweet pepper found in Serbia, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria a climate and a soil that suited it perfectly, and the fleshy red kapia and roga peppers grown around Leskovac and the Pelagonia plain are amongst the finest roasting peppers in the world. What the Balkans made of them is less a recipe than a season. Each autumn, when the peppers come in by the sackful and are cheapest, whole families gather to roast them over open fires and wood stoves, sweat them in covered tubs, peel the blackened skins by hand, and mill the sweet flesh with oil, salt, and vinegar into ajvar, the thick red relish that is eaten all winter with bread, cheese, and grilled meat and that is spoken of, only half in jest, as Serbian and Macedonian caviar. Every household holds that its own ajvar is the correct one, and the arguments over whether aubergine belongs in it are perennial. Beside the ajvar stands punjena paprika, sweet peppers stuffed with rice and minced meat and baked slowly in a tomato sauce, the Sunday dish of the whole region. In the Balkans the sweet pepper is not an ingredient but an institution.
Tunis, Fez & the Maghreb — c. 1700 CE
Spanish and Portuguese ships carried the sweet pepper south across the Mediterranean into the Maghreb, where it met a cooking already devoted to slow-simmered vegetables and to the char of the grill, and became one of the defining vegetables of North Africa. The Maghrebi technique is above all to roast: peppers are blackened whole over coals or a flame until the skin blisters and lifts, then sweated, peeled, and chopped, which concentrates their sweetness and lends the smokiness that runs through the region's cooked salads. From this come the great pepper dishes of North Africa: the Moroccan taktouka, of roasted peppers and tomatoes cooked down with garlic and cumin and eaten warm or cold with bread; the Tunisian salade mechouia, in which grilled peppers and tomatoes are chopped with olive oil, caraway, and coriander and topped with tuna and egg; and the chakchouka, peppers and tomatoes stewed to a thick sauce in which eggs are poached, which travelled from the Maghreb across the Levant to become the shakshuka now eaten from Tel Aviv to London. Sweet peppers, hot peppers, and the fiery harissa that binds much of the region's cooking all descend from the same American plant, and in the Maghreb the sweet and the hot are used side by side in nearly every dish.
Lagos & the West African Coast — c. 1700 CE
Portuguese and Spanish traders carried Capsicum down the Atlantic coast of Africa within decades of its arrival in Europe, and West Africa took to it with an enthusiasm matched almost nowhere else; but where much of the world adopted the pepper as a spice, the cooking of the Guinea coast built its foundations on the fruit itself. The Yoruba obe ata, the 'pepper stew' that underlies an enormous share of Nigerian cooking, is made by blending raw red peppers, tomatoes, onions, and scotch bonnets to a purée and frying the mixture in palm or vegetable oil for a long time, until the water cooks off, the raw edge is gone, and the base darkens and the oil rises to the surface. The bulk of that purée is sweet red pepper, which supplies body, colour, and sweetness while the scotch bonnet supplies the heat, and the two are used in a deliberate ratio that every cook adjusts. Upon this base rest the great dishes of the region, above all jollof rice, in which the rice is cooked directly in the pepper stew and takes its colour and its flavour from it, and which is the subject of the fiercest and most cheerful culinary rivalry in Africa. In West Africa the sweet pepper is not a vegetable served beside the meal; it is the sauce in which the meal is made.
Puerto Rico & the Hispanic Caribbean — c. 1700 CE
In the Hispanic Caribbean the sweet pepper of choice is not the European bell at all but the ají dulce, the non-pungent form of the Amazonian Capsicum chinense that the Arawak and Carib peoples had carried northward into the islands long before any European arrived. Small, squat, wrinkled, and ripening through green and orange to red, it carries the whole floral, apricot-scented perfume of its cousin the habanero with none of the fire, and there is no true substitute for it. It is the irreplaceable aromatic of sofrito, the fried flavour base upon which the entire cooking of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Venezuela is constructed: ají dulce pounded or blitzed with onion, garlic, sweet peppers, and the long-leaved herb culantro into a fragrant green paste, kept in the refrigerator or frozen in portions, and fried in oil or annatto-tinted lard as the first step of almost every rice dish, stew, and pot of beans. A Puerto Rican kitchen without sofrito in it is scarcely a kitchen. From the Spanish Caribbean the practice of beginning a dish with a fried aromatic base would travel north to the Gulf coast and become the foundation of Creole and Cajun cooking.
Bahia & the Brazilian Coast — c. 1750 CE
The sweet pepper returned to South America as a European plant. The continent had its own mild capsicums, the ají dulce of the Amazon and the Guianas, but the blocky, thick-walled, wholly sweet pimentão that Brazilians cook with today is Capsicum annuum in the form selected in the gardens of Iberia and the Mediterranean, carried back across the Atlantic by the Portuguese to a continent where the genus had begun. In Brazil it was absorbed into the foundation of the national cooking: the refogado, the slow-fried base of onion, garlic, tomato, and pimentão on which an enormous proportion of Brazilian savoury dishes is built, the direct cousin of the Spanish sofrito and the Louisiana trinity. Its finest expression is the moqueca of Bahia, a dish that is itself a summary of Brazilian history: an Indigenous Tupi technique of cooking fish in a parcel, the name descending from the Tupi pokeka; Portuguese ingredients in the tomato, onion, and pimentão layered raw through the pot; and, from the transatlantic slave trade, the coconut milk and the vivid orange dendê palm oil that make the Bahian version unmistakable. Sliced into rings and laid in bands between the fish, the sweet pepper is not seasoning here but structure, and its sweetness against the dendê is essential to the dish. Beyond the moqueca the pimentão colours the vinagrete spooned over churrasco and the fillings of the salgados, and it is one of the most ubiquitous vegetables on the Brazilian table.
New Orleans, Louisiana & the American South — c. 1800 CE
Louisiana gave the sweet pepper the role it holds in American cooking, and it did so by rewriting a French formula with a New World vegetable. Classical French cooking begins a great many dishes with a mirepoix of onion, celery, and carrot; the Creole and Cajun cooks of Louisiana, working in a Spanish-governed colony with Caribbean connections and a settled local habit of building dishes on a fried aromatic base, replaced the carrot with the green bell pepper. The result, onion, celery, and bell pepper diced and softened in fat, is the holy trinity, and it opens gumbo, jambalaya, étouffée, dirty rice, red beans and rice, and most of the rest of the Louisiana repertoire; cooks speak of it with only partial irony as a sacred formula, and a cook who leaves out the pepper is held to be making something else. The green pepper is used deliberately here rather than the sweeter red, for its slight bitterness and grassy edge are wanted against the richness of the roux, the sausage, and the shellfish. Beside the trinity the hollow pepper serves as a vessel, and Creole stuffed peppers, packed with rice, shrimp or ham, and the trinity itself, are a fixture of the New Orleans home table.
Shimla, the Punjab & the North Indian Kitchen — c. 1850 CE
Portuguese traders carried the capsicum to the Indian coast in the sixteenth century, and India took to the pungent kinds so completely that the chilli became the defining heat of the subcontinent's cooking. The sweet, non-pungent pepper arrived later and by a different road, and its Hindi name records exactly where: shimla mirch, the 'Shimla chilli', after the Himalayan hill station that served as the summer capital of the British Raj, in whose cool mountain gardens the vegetable would grow as it would not in the heat of the plains. The name is a small fossil of the colonial encounter, and a quietly absurd one, for it calls a mild vegetable a chilli. North Indian cooks treat it accordingly: not as a source of heat but as a vegetable with a green, faintly bitter bite. It fills the everyday bharwan shimla mirch, whole capsicums packed with spiced potato and cooked until the skins blister; it is thrown in thick petals into the fierce, fast-seared kadai dishes, where it is so essential that a kadai paneer without it is not a kadai at all; it is threaded between cubes of paneer and onion on the skewers of the tandoor; and it is central to the whole Indo-Chinese repertoire of chilli paneer, gobi manchurian, and the rest, that Chinese-Indian cooking invented in Kolkata and now beloved across the country. India is today amongst the largest growers of the vegetable in the world.
China & the Modern Stir-Fry — c. 1900 CE
Capsicum reached China with Portuguese maritime trade in the later sixteenth century and was taken up first, and most famously, as a spice, transforming the cooking of Sichuan, Hunan, and Guizhou beyond recognition. The sweet, thick-walled pepper followed far later and by a different logic, entering Chinese cooking in the modern era as a vegetable rather than a seasoning, and it proved ideally suited to the wok: cut into squares or slivers, it holds its shape and its crispness under fierce heat, releases little water, and takes on the smoky char of the pan without collapsing. The green pepper, qingjiao, became a standard of the everyday Chinese kitchen, and its defining dish is qingjiao rousi, green pepper and pork slivers, in which pork is velveted in cornflour and rice wine, seared, and tossed with matchsticks of sweet pepper in a light savoury sauce, a dish found in every home and canteen across the north and the centre of the country. Bell peppers of every colour now appear throughout modern Chinese cooking, in sweet-and-sour dishes, in stir-fries with beef and black bean, and on the skewers of the barbecue stall, and China has become, by a wide margin, the largest grower of sweet peppers in the world.
