Tabasco sauce

Tabasco sauce is a brand of hot sauce made from tabasco peppers (Capsicum frutescens var. tabasco), vinegar, and salt, and aged in white oak barrels for three years. It has a hot, spicy flavor and is popular in many parts of the world.

Tabasco is trademarked as the brand name for the variety of tabasco sauce marketed by one of the United States' biggest producers of hot sauce, the McIlhenny Company of Avery Island, Louisiana.^[1] Often, the word tabasco is rendered in lowercase when referring to the botanical variety, but in uppercase, Tabasco, when referring to the actual trademarked brand name. While there are many other kinds on the market, Tabasco is the most famous brand of "hot pepper sauce". Although it is produced in the United States, it acquired its name from the state of Tabasco in Mexico. The McIlhenny Company is now in its fifth generation as a family-run business. All of the 145 shareholders either inherited their stock or were given it from another living family member.^[1]

History

Tabasco sauce was invented in 1868 by Edmund McIlhenny, a Maryland-born former banker who had moved to Louisiana around 1840. On his death in 1890, McIlhenny was succeeded by his eldest son, John Avery McIlhenny, who expanded and modernized the business, but resigned after a few years to join Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders volunteer cavalry regiment.

On John's departure, brother Edward Avery McIlhenny, a self-taught naturalist fresh from an arctic adventure, assumed control of the company, running it from 1898 to his death in 1949. Like his brother, Edward focused on expansion and modernization, as did war hero Walter S. McIlhenny, who, after serving in the U.S. Marines at Guadalcanal and elsewhere, oversaw the company until his death in 1985.

Today, McIlhenny Company remains a privately held business presided over by a member of the McIlhenny family.

Production

A Tabasco advertisement from ca. 1905. Note the cork-top bottle and diamond logo label, both of which are similar to those in use today.

From seeds to sauce

Until recently, all of the peppers were grown on Avery Island. While a small portion of the crop is still grown on the island, the bulk of the crop is now grown in Central and South America, where the weather and the availability of more farmland allow a more predictable and larger year-round supply of peppers. This also helps to ensure the supply of peppers should something happen to the crop at a particular location. All of the seeds are still grown on Avery Island.

Following company tradition, the peppers are hand picked by workers. To tell their ripeness, peppers are checked with a little red stick, or 'le petit bâton rouge' that each worker carries around. Those peppers not matching the color of the stick are not harvested. Harvested peppers are shipped back to the Island factory. Peppers are ground into mash, and salt and vinegar are added. The mixture is put into old white oak whiskey barrels from distilleries to age for up to three years. The bright red mash is so corrosive that forklifts are reported to last only six years.^[1] Three giant mixing vats at the factory hold more hot sauce than Edmund McIlhenny brewed in his entire lifetime. A single mixing vat contains about 3,000 pounds of mash and 1,400 gallons of vinegar. One vat can produce about 1,600 gallons of finished sauce."^[2] Much of the salt used in Tabasco production is acquired locally from Avery Island's own salt mine, one of the largest in the U.S.

Avery Island was hit hard by tropical storms in 2005, especially Hurricane Rita. The factory barely escaped major damage^[3] As a result of a long history of dodging tropical storms, the family plans to spend $5 million on constructing a 17-foot (5.2 m) levee and a back-up generator.

Varieties

Tabasco has been produced by McIlhenny Company since 1868. Several new types of sauces are now produced under the name Tabasco Sauce, including jalapeño-based green, chipotle-based smoked, habanero, garlic, and "sweet and spicy" sauces. McIlhenny also produces Tabasco soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, barbecue sauce and steak sauce.

The habanero sauce and garlic sauces both include the tabasco peppers blended with other peppers, whereas the jalapeño variety does not include tabasco peppers.

None of these products undergoes the three-year aging process the flagship product uses.

Heat

The original, classic red variety of Tabasco pepper sauce measures 2,500-5,000 SCU on the Scoville scale. The habanero sauce is considerably hotter, rating 7,000-8,000 Scoville units. The chipotle sauce adds chipotle pepper to the original sauce, measures 2,000-2,500. The garlic variety, which blends milder peppers in with the tabasco peppers, rates 1,200-1,800 Scovilles, and the green pepper (jalapeño) sauce is even milder at 600-800 Scovilles. Their Sweet and Spicy sauce is the mildest at only 100-600 Scoville Units.

Packaging

Classic Tabasco red pepper sauce

Tabasco brand pepper sauce is sold in more than 160 countries and territories and is packaged in 22 languages and dialects. As many as 720,000 two-ounce (57ml) bottles of Tabasco^[1] sauce are produced each day at the Tabasco factory on Avery Island, Louisiana. These bottles range in size from the common two-ounce and five-ounce (57ml and 148 ml) bottles available in most grocery stores, up to a one US gallon (3.8 liter) jug for food service businesses, and down to a 1/8th-ounce (3.7 ml) miniature bottle. McDonalds in North America used these diminutive Tabasco bottles during early McRib promotions, as did the US military, to liven up the food entrees in Meals, Ready-to-Eat.

Merchandise

In addition, the company has cashed in on its brand name by licensing the production of branded merchandise, including neckties, hand towels, golf shirts, boxer shorts, posters, Bloody Mary mix, and even casino slot machines featuring the trademarked diamond logo.

Usage

McIlhenny Company now produces numerous Tabasco brand products that contain pepper seasoning, including popcorn, nuts, olives, mayonnaise, mustard, steak sauce, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, grilling/marinating sauce, barbecue sauce, chili sauce, pepper jelly, and Bloody Mary mix. McIlhenny Company also permits other brands to use and advertise Tabasco sauce as an ingredient in their products, including Spam, Slim Jim beef sticks, Heinz ketchup, A1 steak sauce, Plochman's mustard, Cheez-It crackers, Lawry's salt, Zapp's potato chips and Vlasic pickles.

Tabasco sauce has a shelf life of five years when stored in a cool and dry place.

Tabasco sauce is widely used to season a variety of foods, such as sandwiches, salads, burgers, oysters, pasta, pork chops, shrimp, hot dogs, baby back ribs, hot wings, prime rib, chitlins, gumbo, Po' boys, french fries, cheese fries, crab cake, scrambled eggs, cole slaw, green beans, corn on the cob, onion rings, barbecue, macaroni and cheese, turkey, catfish, stirfry, nachos, calzones, black-eyed peas, soup and omelettes, pizza, potato chips, Spam, Cheez-Its, and even mashed potatoes.

The hot sauce is shipped to 160 countries and territories around the world.

Tabasco and the U.S. military

During the Spanish-American War, John Avery McIlhenny, son of Tabasco's inventor and second president of McIlhenny Company, served in the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, better known as Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders. His son, Brigadier General Walter Stauffer McIlhenny, USMCR, a World War II veteran and recipient of the Navy Cross, presided over McIlhenny Company from 1949 until his death in 1985. During the Vietnam War, BGen. McIlhenny issued the The Charlie Ration Cookbook. (Charlie ration was slang for the field meal given to troops.) This cookbook came wrapped around a two-ounce bottle of Tabasco sauce in a camouflaged, water-resistant container. It included instructions on how to mix C-rations to make such tasty concoctions as "Combat Canapés" or "Breast of Chicken under Bullets."^[2]

During the 1980s, the U.S. military began to include miniature bottles of Tabasco sauce in its MREs. Eventually, miniature bottles of Tabasco sauce were included in two-thirds of all MRE menus. During the same period, McIlhenny Company issued a new military-oriented cookbook using characters from the comic strip Beetle Bailey, titled The Unofficial MRE Cookbook, which it offered free of charge to U.S. troops. In response to these gestures, service personnel wrote many letters of thanks to McIlhenny Company.

Most recently, U.S. troops in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom and in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom have received Tabasco sauce in their MREs, as well as in care packages sent directly to individual troops courtesy of McIlhenny Company.

McIlhenny Company's relationship with the military extends beyond combat situations. The U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps list over 400 mess halls that offer Tabasco sauce on their tables. In fact, Tabasco sauce is found on the table of every Officer's Mess in the Marine Corps.

Walter Stauffer McIlhenny was a benefactor of the Marine Military Academy. As a result, a bottle of Tabasco sauce can be found on every table in the school's mess hall. McIlhenny was a member of the Academy's General H. M. Smith Foundation, and the school named one of its buildings after him.

Tabasco in space

Tabasco is on the official menu of the space shuttle.^[2] Through NASA's relation to the US Military, Tabasco has found its way into the space program. Tabasco Sauce was used on Skylab by NASA to address astronauts' complaints about bland rations. Tabasco is often used in space, both on the International Space Station and during shuttle missions.

Popular culture references

• In 1909 composer Charles L. Johnson published a tune called "Tobasco Rag Time Waltz" [sic].
• An early style bottle of Tabasco sauce is briefly seen in the film Back to the Future Part III (1990) as an ingredient of a mix used to wake Doctor Emmett Brown from a drunken stupor.
• Charlie Chaplin uses a Tabasco sauce bottle as a comedic prop in his 1917 movie The Immigrant.
• During a 1932 "Buy British" campaign sponsored by the British Government, Tabasco sauce bottles were removed from the tables of the House of Commons dining rooms. The Members of Parliament demanded that Tabasco sauce be returned to their tables and this led to slang phrase, "the real Tabasco", which appears in many popular novels of the period, especially those by P.G. Wodehouse.
• In Apocalypse Now (1979) the character Chef can be seen sprinkling Tabasco sauce into a meal he is making on the boat.
• Tabasco sauce appears in two James Bond movies: The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). (Oddly enough, it was not featured in Live and Let Die (1973), which took place in New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana.)
• Ben Affleck reads aloud the back label of a Tabasco sauce bottle in the 2003 movie Gigli.
• Tabasco sauce has become an Internet Meme as a symbol for manliness. It is commonly used by Internet satirist Maddox,^[4] and by other smaller websites.
• Turn-of-the-20th-century baseball player Norman Elberfeld was known as "The Tabasco Kid" because of his fiery temper.
• The aliens on television series Roswell use Tabasco on almost everything they eat.
• In an issue of the Lucky Luke comic book, Billy the Kid uses Tabasco sauce to escape from a Mexican jail cell. The Tabasco sauce is portrayed as so strong that it actually corrodes the iron bars in the jail cell's windows.
• Used as an ingredient for a very unusual candy invented by Alvin Fernald in the Alvin series of children's books by Clifford B. Hicks.
• The Hanna-Barbera cartoon movie Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998) takes place in the swamps of south Louisiana on an island on which peppers are grown - clearly a reference to Avery Island, Louisiana, where Tabasco sauce is manufactured. Interestingly, a chef-sized bottle of Tabasco sauce appears in the opening minutes of the live-action major motion picture Scooby Doo (2002).
• In The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, a Tabasco bottle is clearly seen floating up in the air in slow motion as Lucas Black's character flips his car while racing a Dodge Viper.
• In Eiichiro Oda's manga One Piece, the character Usopp uses Tabasco to create pepper ammunition for his slingshot.
• In the Warner Brother's Cartoon "Hyde and go Tweet" (1960), Sylvester notes out loud finding Tabasco in the cupboard while looking for ketchup.
• Tabasco is used as a source of child abuse in Richard B. Pelzer's book A Brother's Journey.

See also

• Edward Avery McIlhenny
• John Avery McIlhenny
• Walter Stauffer McIlhenny
• Team Tabasco

Notes

References

External links

• Official website
• Tabasco sauce timeline