Tabasco story as hot as the sauce
Source of Recipe
Cape Cod Online
What do a chili pepper from Mexico, an outcropping of Louisiana salt and a Wild West bartender from Massachusetts have in common? They are all part of the Tabasco Pepper Sauce saga, a tale of wars, ruined hopes, international controversy and the inspiration for a hot time the world over.
The Tabasco story opens in the 1850's when Edmund McIlhenny, a banker from New Orleans received a fiery gift of hot peppers from a Confederate soldier returning from duty in the Tabasco region of Mexico. McIlhenny loved the taste and planted the pepper seeds at his wife's plantation on Avery Island, a large natural salt dome surrounded by gulf coast bayou.
When Northern troops swept into Louisiana during the Civil War, the McIlhenny clan fled New Orleans to the relative safety of Avery Island and the peppers. The Union Army pressed on to Avery Island, taking the island's salt mines and, according to legend, moving into the McIlhenny family plantation as their command post, driving the McIlhennys to Texas for refuge.
When the smoke cleared and the McIlhenny's crept back to Avery Island, the mansion had been sacked and the plantation razed. Only the pepper patch had survived the Northern occupation.
Undaunted by his family's loss, McIlhenny put his remaining stock to use, and in 1868 created a recipe for hot pepper sauce using Avery Island salt and vinegar. McIlhenny bottled his first batch in used cologne bottles.
With the help of a sympathetic Union general and some creative marketing, McIlhenny's Tabasco Pepper Sauce took flight. In 1870, McIlhenny sent some of his hot stuff to market in London and the Brits eagerly welcomed Tabasco to their dinner tables.
McIlhenny's Tabasco sauce has influenced cuisine from bayou country to the Sudan desert to the jungles of Vietnam. When British Parliament decided to ban certain foreign imports including Tabasco sauce, the backlash from ardent hotheads sparked the "Tabasco Tempest," which eventually restored the beloved sauce to the store shelves.
In 1931, an American bartender used Tabasco sauce as his inspiration for the Bloody Mary and Tabasco rode with British troops in 1895 to the invasion of Khartoum, Sudan. During the Vietnam War, thousands of American soldiers got tiny bottles of Tabasco sauce in their C-rations to spice up the notoriously bland cuisine.
In 2002, archeologists excavating a mining town in Virginia City found a 130-year-old bottle of Tabasco in the remains of the Boston Saloon owned by an African American from Massachusetts. The bottle was empty.
Not bad for a little patch of peppers.
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