On a cold and wet October day, Mick Kipp and I went to One Straw Farm to see a bit of Maryland's heritage ripening in the ground. Kipp drove his truck up the muddy road between the fields and stopped at a row of low bushes with odd green-and-white leaves. The multicolored fruits hanging off them looked like Christmas lights, but with white stripes. When I picked one and bit into it, I first tasted a tangy sweetness followed by a potent heat in the back of my throat.

These were fish peppers, a striking-looking hot pepper that was once famous in this region but is now very rare—almost lost, in fact. But Kipp, who is known around town for the line of spice blends and rubs he sells at his Whiskey Island Pirate Shop (www.whiskeyisland.com) inside the Mill Valley General Store in Remington, hopes this modest row of about thirty plants represents the vanguard of a fish pepper comeback. He sees a day when farmers' markets sell bushels of peppers and restaurateurs cook dishes laced with the fiery fruits. He's planning a line of fish pepper dusts and sauces, and he's formed a partnership with One Straw Farm, an organic farm in White Hall, to pull this off. "This is a two- to five-year project," he says, "to see if we could grow enough peppers so that we could seed them, offer them fresh, offer them for drying and sauces, and make them available to the community."

I should mention that this is a project that I played a small role in starting. In 2008, I got a copy of Gary Paul Nabhan's Renewing America's Food Traditions, a book that catalogs rare and endangered food varieties of North America, such as Honey Drip cane sorghum, Seminole pumpkins, or Java chickens. One page struck me: a photograph of hot peppers in green, purple, orange, and red, striped from top to bottom with white to match their variegated foliage. The text explained that the fish pepper was first grown in 19th-century Baltimore, largely by African Americans, and was so named because it was used in the region's oyster and crab houses.

I took the book to Kipp, Baltimore's best-known hot-pepper aficionado, whom I've known since I wrote a profile about him in the Sun a few years ago. Kipp was hooked from the moment I showed him the picture; I gave him the book and never got it back.

Resurrecting heirloom fruits and vegetables is the latest wave in the local food revolution. For some, heirloom varieties have the appeal of oddity—black tomatoes, purple potatoes, cone-shaped cantaloupes, and so on. But growing heirlooms also preserves genetic diversity, which may help future breeders create plants that resist diseases or survive changing climates. Nabhan, who lives in Arizona, is particularly interested in bringing back the "mission fruits" of the Southwest—figs, grapes, olives, and pomegranates imported by Jesuit missionaries in the 1700s. "The issue here is not about some sort of retro thing, preserving the past in a static way," he told me recently. "It's a question of having enough diversity to provide us options for the future."

The histories of heirlooms—often some hybrid of legend and fact—are part of their appeal, and the story of fish peppers is deeply embedded in Mid-Atlantic food lore. A mutation of the serrano pepper that first appeared around 1870, fish peppers start out white before turning orange, purple, or red. They were primarily grown by African American "truck farmers" who supplied produce for seafood houses around the bay, where young white peppers were favored because they could be blended invisibly into cream sauces. Fish peppers pack considerable heat—rating about 45,000 to 75,000 units on the Scoville scale that measures the spiciness of chili peppers. (A jalapeño ranks between 2,500 and 8,000 Scoville units.) One legend says that hot fish peppers will only come from seeds planted in a fit of anger.

According to Nabhan, fish peppers went into decline in the mid-20th century, after oyster populations crashed and seafood houses started to close. Kipp has asked farmers and customers at the Waverly market if they have heard of the fish pepper. Only one, an older African American man, had a vague recollection of them from when he was a kid.

Finding seeds proved to be tricky: In the weeks before planting time last spring, Kipp ordered fish pepper seeds from several horticultural catalogs, only to be told that none were in stock. He finally scored two packets from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (http://rareseeds.com), a Missouri company that specializes in rare varieties. Then he hooked up with Drew and Joan Norman of One Straw Farm to grow his first row of 2-foot-tall plants. 

Once they ripened, Kipp tried the peppers out in the kitchen, whipping up a cream-of-mushroom soup with blue cheese and fish peppers. "It had a warmth that just filled the mouth—it was delicious," he says, noting that the cream blunted the heat. But, to his disappointment, he found that the fish pepper's taste was similar to that of a serrano or cayenne. He's hoping that the flavor had been affected by the cool, wet summer, and that future batches will pop with a new taste.

It's also possible that his peppers weren't true fishes. When I visited the row of plants last fall, I noticed they were growing next to other pepper varieties, like jalapeños. Capsicum annuum peppers—including fish, jalapeño, and other varieties—cross-pollinate. Part of Kipp's challenge is learning how to breed true plants. In his classic gardening bible, Heirloom Vegetable Gardening, William Woys Weaver makes that sound fairly daunting: Because of their mutant nature, fish peppers go through "genetic turmoil" now and then, he writes, occasionally producing weak, top-heavy, and sterile plants. And they should be grown close together, for maximum cross-pollination, yet 500 feet away from everything else.

But Alexia Savold, a horticulturalist for the Accokeek Foundation, a nonprofit that preserves Maryland history at a site along the Potomac River, says fish peppers are "super easy to grow"—just start them inside in February, put them out in May, and they take care of themselves. Savold grows fish peppers in the foundation's museum garden in southern Prince George's County and offers some of their seeds through Seed Savers Exchange (www.seedsavers.org), an Iowa nonprofit that distributes heirloom plant seeds. The 19th-century fish pepper is a bit anachronistic for the 18th-century living history museum, she says, "but we like to have them on hand because their story is so good."

Even though Kipp has already seeded dozens of peppers from last year's crop, I got more pure seeds from Savold and passed them to him. He's going to grow them far from other peppers at One Straw Farm this spring and see whether his seeds sprout true—or at all. In time, he hopes, the project will yield a large, regular crop of fish peppers, enough that he can start offering them to school gardens and churches, particularly in the city's African American community. "It might be a way of giving some of their heritage back," he says. 

—Scott Carlson wrote about urban gleaning in the January 2010 Urbanite.



  On the air: More about heirloom vegetable gardening on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on May 20.