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.
It’s interesting to consider how many distinctive breeds of plant just vanish.
One time when I was making hot sauce my mother started reminiscing about her grandmother would soak some tiny peppers in vinegar to make hotsauce. From the sounds of things it was some variety of tabasco pepper. But she had been growing and selecting these peppers for multiple decades and so they had probably grown into a distinct variety… and then she died and the variety was lost.
Ultimately they were created by humans via selective propagation and died out because people stopped growing them. They don’t exist in nature so it’s hard to recover them.