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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.