Tabasco Sauce: A Little History and Some Non-Food Related Uses

I actually buy Tabasco Sauce by the gallon. No fooling, you can have it delivered to your door from the Avery Island manufacturing plant where Tabasco is created. Admittedly, Tabasco isn't the hottest hot sauce in the land-it's certainly nowhere near as high up the Scoville heat scale as Dave's Insanity Sauce or The Source, but what it lacks in pure, eye-watering intensity it makes up for in flavor. Of course, Tabasco can also be used to flavor every food known to man: I prefer it on pizza, mixed with Heinz 57 for meat and chicken dipping, and to add much-needed pizzazz to fried eggs. And on that subject, if you haven't tried adding Tabasco Sauce to the pan when you fry foods, you are not only missing out on delicious seasoning but a fine aroma permeating your residence.

The history of Tabasco Sauce goes back to the Civil War when a Confederate loyalist banker named Edmund McIlhenny returned back to his family's plantation on Avery Island after running screaming like Ned Flanders when Union troops arrived in the Big Easy in 1862. Sure enough, the big bad Union troops had run through his plantation just like they did Tara in Gone with the Wind and McIlhenny found he had to turn to something besides mining salt to retrieve his fortune. About the only thing the soldiers hadn't plundered were some hot peppers. Now, Edmund McIlhenny was far from a stupid man and he was not exactly lacking in ambition, either. He settled his mind down to working out some way get rich using those hot peppers. You have to understand that Avery Island is an island that is really more like a huge salt lick. What I'm trying to say is that there's a lot of salt on Avery Island. A lot. And so McIlhenny crushed his red peppers and proceeded to mix them with salt and then let the result age for a month. Tabasco Sauce was officially born in 1868 when Edmund McIlhenny strained his new brand of hot flavoring into several cologne bottles and shared them with his friends.