GREEN PEPPERS are rapidly growing into favor with progressive housewives. They should be full-grown when gathered, but not at all reddened. In cutting them be careful to handle the seeds as little as possible, lest you pay for your carelessness with sore and burning finger-tips. Use a small knife or a stick to extract them. When they are out, the pepper is cool and sweet.

Fried Sweet Peppers

Cut open crosswise, extract the seeds, cut the peppers into slices, lay in cold water for fifteen minutes, salt slightly, dust with flour and fry in hot cottolene for five or six minutes. They are an appetizing accompaniment to cold meat or to boiled fish.

Stuffed Sweet Peppers

Make an incision in one side, and extract the seeds through this with a bit of stick. Stuff with a force-meat of tongue, chicken, ham, or veal, mixed up with boiled rice, and seasoned with salt, a dash of onion-juice, and a little butter. Sew up the peppers with a few stitches, pack them into a bake-dish, pour in enough weak stock to keep them from burning, cover and bake in a moderate oven for an hour, then dish, withdrawing the strings. Keep hot while you add to the gravy in the dish a tablespoonful of brown roux. Boil up once and pour over the peppers. Should the gravy have boiled away too much, put in a little boiling water to thin the roux.

This is a Syrian recipe and excellent.

Green Peppers Au Gratin

Cut the stem-end from a dozen peppers and dig out the seeds with a penknife and a small spoon. Lay the peppers in cold water for half an hour. Make a force-meat of half a cupful of cold boiled rice and an equal quantity of cold minced chicken, seasoned with salt and butter and wet with tomato-juice. Fill the peppers with the mixture, heaping it up, stand them on end, close together, in a deep dish, leaving off the stem-tops; fill the interstices with the force-meat and pour a good tomato sauce, thickened with drawn butter, into the dish, leaving the upper part of the peppers visible; sift fine crumbs over all, stick bits of butter here and there, and cook, covered, one hour, then brown. Serve in the bake-dish. 18

Pepper Baskets

A pretty luncheon dish is made of green peppers. Cut a piece from the blossom-end of each and shave off the stem, so that it will stand steadily upon a plate. Fill with hot minced chicken or fish, seasoned with a mayonnaise or other piquante dressing.