Mixed greens, feta cheese, roasted red peppers, tomato, cucumber, onion, and sun-dried-tomato spread are rolled in lahvosh in the Fields & Feta Wrap at Boston-based Au Bon Pain, which also offers a Cheddar tuna melt topped with roasted red peppers. Among salads, the peppers appear in the Mediterranean Chicken Salad along with artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, and feta, and are offered as an à la carte selection in a family of toppings that includes roasted-red-pepper hummus.

Panera Bread based in Richmond Heights, Missouri, employs roasted red peppers in a biting cheese sauce in the company’s Pepperblue Steak sandwich, which consists of seasoned steak filets, lettuce, tomato, red onion, and creamy Gorgonzola/roasted red-pepper sauce on toasted ciabatta.

And around the corner at Dallas-based Corner Bakery, the vegetarian Tomato Mozzarella Sandwich shows off plum tomato, fresh mozzarella, sweet roasted red peppers, and fresh basil, all drizzled with balsamic vinaigrette and served on ciabatta.

Blame Christopher Columbus for doing to bell peppers what he did to Native Americans; he named them something other than what they were. A bell pepper is closely related to the chile-pepper family of plants, it’s true, but a recessive gene in the bell pepper eliminates capsaicin, which is responsible for a fruit’s heat. Columbus likely didn’t concern himself with botanic PC-speak when he discovered bell peppers in the New World. He was more interested in profiting from the bell pepper when introducing it to Europe, where black pepper was a coveted seasoning. So he proclaimed it pimentón, Spanish for “big pepper.”

The name stuck. In Hungary and Scandinavia, a bell pepper is paprika, and in France, poivron (related to poivre, or black pepper). North America is the only place where the “bell” pepper has a certain ring, as it’s merely a pepper in the British Isles, and known as capsicum in Australia, India, and Malaysia. Russians call it bolgarskiy perets, or Bulgarian pepper.

While bell peppers can nearly be any color in the rainbow, they all start out green and mature to either red, yellow, orange, or, in rarer instances, purple, white, blue, or brown. Which color a baby bell pepper grows into depends on its cultivated variety. Green, unripe bell peppers are cheaper and far more ubiquitous than red, mature bell peppers that are left to sun-ripen on the vine, which some might think ironic since green bell peppers are also less sweet and more bitter even if allowed to ripen in storage.

The dry-heat cooking method of roasting boosts the natural sweetness of a red bell pepper even more by caramelizing some of the fruit’s sugar and creating a more intriguing taste sensation, says Kirk T. Bachmann, C.E.C., vice president of education and corporate executive chef for Le Cordon Bleu Schools North America based in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. Indeed, in the teaching curriculum employed at Le Cordon Bleu schools around the world, the cooking method—rather than the ingredient—is emphasized to culinary students, the rationale being that once a student understands the art and science of roasting, he or she can yield the best finished product from any food to which it’s applied.