Peppers, Hot and Sweet: Over One Hundred Recipes for All Tastes

Dooley ( It's the Berries ) sings the praises of the pepper, both for gardeners with bumper crops and for city-bred zealots. While her writing can be amateurish, her sentiment is sincere. Recipes span updated family favorites, like Italian stuffed peppers, to more robust fixings (fire and ice gazpachosic , Sri Lanka curry, Haitian sweet and spicy pork). Along with those are pepper-studded breads and muffins, sauces, jellies and salsas. Although the book opens with an introduction to the full gamut of pepper varieties, recipes fail to do justice to such variety. Instead, Dooley relies on sweet types--red and yellow peppers--which are often at least twice as expensive as the green. Also amiss is her notion that pepper dishes serve well as accompaniments to other pepper dishes. Dooley rashly suggests that roasted pepper and cheese bread is ``delicious with Sheila's Pumpkin and Roasted Pepper Soup or Tricolor Bell Peppers and Roast Beef Salad.'' Such a scheme might in fact overwhelm the palate and obscure individual flavors. BOMC alternate. (Sept.)