The US pepper that was nearly lost

Once grown almost solely by enslaved people, the fish pepper was nearly lost forever until a chance find in a freezer revived the plant and it's now more popular than ever.

The fish pepper has a striking appearance. Growing to a height of about 61cm (2ft), its leaves are a variegated silver and green. The spicy peppers start out as creamy white with striations before turning green and then red, though they never completely lose their stripes. They're a mutation of serrano or cayenne peppers, carrying a recessive gene for albinism, and until very recently, they were grown almost exclusively in the Chesapeake Bay area of the US' Mid-Atlantic coast.

The fish pepper (named for its common use in seafood dishes) is popular today, but it nearly disappeared altogether: that it still exists is thanks to William Woys Weaver, a Maryland author and ethnographer. In 1995, Weaver discovered a jar of seeds in the bottom of a freezer that belonged to his grandfather, H Ralph Weaver. Back in the 1940s, African American folk artist Horace Pippin gifted the fish pepper seeds to H Ralph Weaver after getting treated by him for arthritis using honeybee stings from a hive belonging to the family.

Decades later, when William found the jar of seeds, he handed them over to the Seed Savers Exchange, a non-profit that catalogues and preserves heirloom varieties. The Exchange regenerated the seeds and began cultivating them before offering them to the public. They first sold in Maryland and the surrounding Mid-Atlantic region before becoming popular elsewhere.

The history of the fish pepper is difficult to trace because it was grown by enslaved African Americans in Maryland who had few, if any, opportunities to record their history on paper. Food historian Michael Twitty believes that the peppers came to Maryland from Haitian merchants sometime in the 19th Century, after Haiti gained independence from France in 1804 and trade with the US flourished. Baltimore was one of the fastest-growing cities in the antebellum United States, and fish peppers found their way into markets and then into enslaved and free peoples' gardens.

Twitty believes that the pepper was used in seafood stews such as gumbo and in cream soups in 19th and early 20th-Century kitchens. Some cookbooks, such as Harry Franklyn Hall's 300 Ways to Cook and Serve Shellfish, published in 1901, reference using unnamed hot peppers in certain recipes. Hall, an African American chef, lived in the Mid-Atlantic and may very well have been referring to the fish pepper.

Once the seeds became available again, local Chesapeake Bay area farmer and educator, Denzel Mitchell, started growing the fish pepper, which he had heard about from Twitty. "When I learned about the story of the fish pepper and specifically its connection to Black people in Maryland, I thought that this was a way to honour the legacy of folks that had come before me," he said. "In the summer of 2008, I went to the farmer's market looking for the plants and I couldn't find them. And so at that point, I was determined to grow some myself." Through his urban farm, Mitchell started cultivating fish peppers.

The fish pepper began to take off after that. Mitchell recalled that "in my first year, I probably grew five plants. By 2012, I would say that there were probably somewhere between 10 and 12 other commercial growers, anywhere from small family to mid-scale size vegetable farms that were growing fish peppers. And then I would say probably by 2015, maybe 25." Today, fish peppers are becoming a common sight in Maryland at farmer's markets.

Chef Spike Gjerde, owner of Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore, Maryland, first heard about the peppers in 2008 after reading Twitty's blog and met Mitchell, who supplied him with his first batch of fish peppers. "I love it because it falls between a serrano chilli and a habanero and it has an intense heat that builds over time. It's not as aggressive as some of the habanero varieties," he said. "When it's green, it's grassy and herbaceous, but as it ripens it takes on kind of a leathery flavour, [with] bare notes of red fruit."

In the early 20th Century, the pepper became kind of a culinary "secret weapon," according to Gjerde. "[African American] chefs would collect these white albino chilli peppers that were spicy, then dry them and grind them up. And so what you had was a way to add spice to something, but you wouldn't see any red, so you could do [something] like a cream sauce and you wouldn't really know where the heat came from."

Gjerde appreciates the fish pepper because of its versatility and values its long tradition in Chesapeake cooking. "It's useful across a wide range of dishes. We invariably have pickled fish peppers, and when they're in season, fresh fish peppers. We also do a ferment and we'll have fermented fish peppers. I even like to use a dried fish pepper the way you would a bay leaf."

Mitchell loves cooking with the peppers, too. "We make them into a pepper relish that then goes on to a dish like a fried oyster or another type of hors d'oeuvre. I would say there's quite a handful of restaurants in Baltimore right now that have some form of fish pepper on their menu somewhere. And then in Philadelphia I've got chef friends and they certainly use it. It was the pepper that was traditionally used in the Philadelphia pepper pot stew, which is a seafood stew."

The flavour that the fish pepper brings is powerful, but to Gjerde, it's an equally important part of the region's heritage. "Chesapeake Bay cooking isn't known to be spicy, but we have a hot pepper that has been grown here and played a role in the foodways of 19th Century Maryland," he said. "One of the great things about our cooking in this region is that it's a blend of African, Caribbean, European and Native American influences and contributions."

BBC.com's World's Table "smashes the kitchen ceiling" by changing the way the world thinks about food, through the past, present and future.

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