by Dave DeWitt
T here is no doubt that this country leads the world in at least the
number of brands of hot sauce produced. And although we think of the hot sauce
boom as a relatively new phenomenon, hot sauces have been popular here for
about two centuries.
Much of what we know about now-extinct brands of hot sauces actually comes
from bottle collectors. There is not a great body of material on the subject of
antique hot sauce bottles, but we are indebted to Betty Zumwalt, author of
Ketchup, Pickles, Sauces: 19th Century Food in Glass, who dutifully
catalogued obscure hot sauce bottles found by collectors. Many of these bottles
were uncovered from archaeological digs and shipwrecks.
Other sources of information about early hot sauces are city directories,
which often contained advertisements for sauces, and newspapers. We know from
these sources that the first bottled cayenne sauces appeared in Massachusetts
around 1807. These were probably homemade and similar to English sauces.
Sometime between 1840 and 1860, J. McCollick & Company of New York City
produced a Bird Pepper Sauce in a large cathedral bottle that was nearly 11
inches tall! This sauce is significant because it was probably made with the
wild chiles called chiltepins or bird peppers.
We also know that in 1849, England’s Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce was
first imported into the United States via the port of New York. That year was
important in the history of hot sauces because it marked the first recorded
crop of tabasco chiles, the vital ingredient of McIlhenny Company’s Tabasco
Pepper Sauce. That crop was grown by a prominent Louisiana banker and
legislator, Colonel Maunsell White, on his Deer Range Plantation. The New
Orleans Daily Delta printed a letter from a visitor to White’s plantation,
who reported, “I must not omit to notice the Colonel’s pepper patch, which is
two acres in extent, all planted with a new species of red pepper, which
Colonel White has introduced into this country, called Tobasco red pepper. The
Colonel attributes the admirable health of his hands to the free use of this
pepper.” Tobasco was an early misspelling of Tabasco, the Mexican state.
Colonel White manufactured the first hot sauce from the “Tobasco” chiles and
advertised bottles of it for sale in 1859. About this time, he gave some chiles
and his sauce recipe to a friend, Edmund McIlhenny, who promptly planted the
seeds on his plantation on Avery Island. McIlhenny’s horticultural enterprise
was interrupted by the Civil War, when invading Union troops captured New
Orleans. In 1863, McIlhenny and his family abandoned their Avery Island
plantation to take refuge in San Antonio, Texas.
When the McIlhenny family returned to Avery Island in 1865, they found their
plantation destroyed and their sugar cane fields in ruin. However, a few
volunteer chile plants still survived, providing enough seeds for McIlhenny to
rebuild his pepper patch. Gradually, his yield of pods increased to the point
where he could experiment with his sauce recipe, in which mashed chiles were
strained and the resulting juice was mixed with vinegar and salt and aged in
50-gallon white oak barrels. In 1868, McIlhenny packaged his aged sauce in 350
used cologne bottles and sent them as samples to likely wholesalers. The sauce
was so popular that orders poured in for thousands of bottles priced at one
dollar each, wholesale, which was quite a bit of money in those days.
In 1870, McIlhenny obtained a patent on his Tabasco Brand (as it was now
called) hot pepper sauce and by 1872 had opened an office in London to handle
the European market. The increasing demand for Tabasco sauce caused changes in
the packaging of the product as the corked bottles sealed with green wax were
replaced by bottles with metal tops.
After the death of Edmund McIlhenny in 1890, the family business was turned
over to his son John, who immediately inherited trouble in the form of a crop
failure. John attempted to locate tabasco chiles in Mexico but could not find
any to meet his specifications. Fortunately, his father had stored sufficent
reserves of pepper mash, so the family business weathered the crisis. However,
that experience taught the family not to depend solely upon tabasco chiles
grown in Louisiana. Today, tabascos are grown under contract in Honduras,
Colombia, and other Central and South American countries, and the mash is
imported into the United States in barrels. John McIlhenny was quite a promoter
and traveled all over the country publicizing his family’s sauce. “I had bill
posters prepared,” he once said, “and had large wooden signs in the fields near
the cities. I had an opera troupe playing a light opera. At different times I
had certain cities canvassed by drummers, in a house-to-house canvass. I had
exhibits in food expositions, with demonstrators attached. I gave away many
thousands of circulars and folders, and miniature bottles of Tabasco pepper
sauce.”
In 1898, another Louisiana entrepreneur (and former McIlhenny employee) named
B. F. Trappey began growing tabasco chiles from Avery Island seed. He founded
the company B. F. Trappey and Sons and began producing his own sauce, which was
also called “Tabasco.” The McIlhenny family eventually responded to this
challenge and a several-decades-long feud by receiving a trademark for their
Tabasco brand in 1906. The trademark did not deter other companies from using
the name Tabasco in their products.
In 1911, the Joseph Campbell Company began selling Campbell’s Tabasco Ketchup
and described it as “the appetizing piquancy of Tabasco Sauce in milder form.”
Obviously noticing the success of McIlhenny’s Tabasco Pepper Sauce, other
companies sprang up all over the country. Charles E. Erath of New Orleans began
manufacturing Extract of Louisiana Pepper, Red Hot Creole Peppersauce in
bottles nearly eight inches tall in 1916. A year later, La Victoria Foods began
manufacturing Salsa Brava in Los Angeles, California. In Louisiana in 1923,
Baumer Foods began manufacturing Crystal Hot Sauce and in 1928, Bruce Foods
started making Original Louisiana Hot Sauce – two brands that are still in
existence today. The Louisiana hot sauce boom continued when, in 1929,
Trappey’s expanded to two plants, one in Lafayette and one in New Iberia. That
same year, the McIlhenny family won a trademark infringement suit against the
Trappeys. From that time on, only the McIlhenny sauce could be called
“Tabasco,” and competitors were reduced to merely including tabasco chiles in
their list of ingredients. The two companies had competed with identically
named sauces for 31 years.
Undoubtedly because of the Wall Street collapse and the Great Depression,
there were no hot sauce start-ups until the start of World War II. In 1941,
Henry Tanklage formed La Victoria Sales Company to market a new La Victoria
salsa line. He introduced red taco sauce, green taco sauce, and enchilada sauce
– the first of their kind in the United States. He took over the entire La
Victoria operation in 1946, which today has 10 different hot sauces covering
the entire salsa spectrum, including Green Chili Salsa and Red Salsa
Jalape�a.
In Texas, salsa manufacturing began in 1947. David and Margaret Pace operated
a small food packing operation in the back of their liquor store in San
Antonio. They were manufacturing syrups, salad dressings, and jellies, and sold
their products door-to-door. David, by trial and error, began to make picante
sauce and test it on his friends. When it was introduced commercially, it was
so popular that the Paces were forced to drop all other products and
concentrate on the picante sauce. But the salsa business was not easy. “In ’47
my sauce bottles exploded all over the grocery shelves because I couldn’t get
the darned formula right,” said David Pace in 1992. During the Forties and
Fifties, hot sauces were sold exclusively in small grocery stores, and
manufacturers were always searching for new products. In 1952, Henry Tanklage
of La Victoria Foods invented and introduced the first commercial taco sauce in
the United States. And in 1955, La Preferida began manufacting a line of
salsas. That same year, incidentally, the first McDonald’s opened.
The 1960s saw the rise of ready-to-eat products such as TV dinners,
supermarkets gaining ground over the small, neighborhood grocery stores, and
the increasing fascination with all things “gourmet.” Gourmet magazine,
which had launched in 1941, and Bon Appetit, launched in 1955, became
the arbiters of American food tastes. But where could one find the exotic
ingredients for the many of the recipes that appeared in those magazines?
Cheese shops were the only incarnation of what would later become gourmet
shops, and they were rare. “In California,” wrote food historian Evan Jones,
“cooks who bought esoteric ingredients did so mostly through mail orders.
Stores making and selling fresh pasta were unheard of.” A wave of food change
swept the country with the “whole foods movement” of the 1970s – and hot sauce
benefitted from the new gourmet retail shops specializing in selling exotic,
imported foods, and products from smaller manufacturers that were not available
in the large supermarkets.
The stage was set for yet another boom in hot sauces, and this one was led by
the smaller manufacturers. In 1975, Patti Swidler of Tucson, Arizona launched
Desert Rose Salsa, a line that was specifically designed to be sold in the
specialty food shops. When her business took off, the reporters came calling
and Patti told them bluntly, “People are making salsa that is no longer salsa.
I still find people gravitate toward authentic flavors.” Four years later, in
Austin, Texas, Dan Jardine began production of Jardine’s commercial salsa,
perhaps starting Austin’s reputation (disputed by San Antonio) as the hot sauce
capital of America. “Austin is a unique place in the United States,” Jardine
said. “There seems to be a lot more salsa companies trying to start here.” A
count by Austin American-Statesman food editor Kitty Crider in 1993
totaled 48 Austin-made salsas. n
Excerpted from Dave Dewitt’s forthcoming book The Hot Sauce
Bible,co-authored by Chuck Evans.
This article appears in August 25 • 1995 and August 25 • 1995 (Cover).