With
eyes watering, Max Davidson tracks down the roots of Tabasco:
Tabasco has been my
salvation more often that I care to think. I once entertained the
West Indian cricketer Gary Sobers to dinner and, sparing on expense,
served beef stroganoff made from the finest fillet. "Do you
have any Tabasco?" asked the great man. The dish was too bland
for the Caribbean palate. Only a desperate rummage through the
larder averted disaster.
In many parts of the
Caribbean, a bottle of Tabasco occupies pride of place at the dinner
table, beside the salt and pepper. The same is true in spades in
Louisiana, where the sauce originates. From city diners to rural
motels, it is as ubiquitous as tomato ketchup in the north of England.
Apart from Coca-Cola and
Monica Lewinsky jokes, Tabasco must be one of the best-known of all
American exports, so when I visited the headquarters of the company, at
Avery Island, in southern Louisiana, I expected to find a vast
multinational conglomerate with all the associated paraphernalia - the
unacceptable face of capitalism.
Not a bit of it.
The company that makes the sauce, producing a princely 500,000 bottles a
day, turns out to be a small family firm employing just 200 people.
In its homespun philosophy, its determination to stay true to its
19th-century roots, it is more like a cottage industry than a powerhouse
in the world market.
The key word is
"family". Paul McIlhenny, president of the McIlhenny
company, is descended from Edmund McIlhenny, its founder. Other
members of the family dominate the boardroom - and have done since 1868,
when the company was established.
Its early history was a
chapter of accidents. Edmund McIlhenny was a New Orleans banker who
made pepper sauce as a hobby. He had been given a handful of dried
peppers by a friend returning from the Mexican War, was attracted by their
fiery taste and, more out of curiosity than anything else, planted some of
the seeds in Avery Island, where his father-in-law had a plantation.
The McIlhennys were
forced to leave the island during the Civil War but, on their return in
1865, found that the pepper plants were flourishing. They were
ideally suited to the fertile soil and humid climate. When Edmund
McIlhenny, after more years of experimenting, perfected his pepper sauce,
he called it tabasco - an Indian word meaning "land where the soil is
humid"; 350 bottles were duly distributed to selected wholesalers.
Apart from a hiccup in
the 1870s, when efforts to market the sauce in England foundered on the
conservatism of Victorian taste buds, the company has never looked
back. More than 150 million bottles of Tabasco pepper sauce are sold
every year. From Munich to Melbourne, it has become the condiment of
choice for lovers of spicy food. But it is the quality, not the
quantity, of their product on which the McIlhenny family prides itself.
You will never produce a
fine pepper sauce by using any old peppers, any more than you will produce
a fine wine by using any old grapes. So, every summer, members of
the family march through the fields of peppers, carefully choosing the
pick of the crop. Seeds from the best peppers are then planted in
greenhouses, for ripening the following year.
It is a slow, painstaking
business, but it brings obvious rewards. Who needs genetically
modified crops when, with judicious selection, you can produce crops which
get better year after year anyway
Although Tabasco now
grows peppers in Honduras, Colombia and Venezuela, all the processing
continues to be done on Avery Island. There is a salt mine on the
island and, after the peppers have been crushed with a small amount of
salt, they are left to ferment in oak barrels for three years.
Only after that time is
the pepper mash blended with distilled vinegar and strained preparatory to
bottling.
Red peppers, salt,
vinegar. There is really nothing more to it than that. No
secret ingredients, no dodgy additives, no artificial flavours or
colouring. It is as organic as hand-reared carrots.
For those of a delicate
disposition, Tabasco has recently introduced a green sauce, made from
milder, jalapeno peppers; but it is the flame-red original sauce to which
the gourmet will surely gravitate.
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