Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, November 25, 1997

First Tabasco peppers were brought here from Mexico

by Jim Bradshaw

The seeds found their way north, and, by the middle 1800s, took root on Avery Island. Edmund McIlhenny had been given a small packet of the pepper seeds by a friend named Gleason. Gleason had fought in the Mexican War and apparently brought the seeds back with him. It is from these seeds that Tabasco pepper sauce would eventually come into being.

McIlhenny nurtured the pepper plants in his wife's kitchen garden, and they were growing there when the family was forced to flee the island during the Civil War. Union soldiers destroyed the salt works and cane crop on the island, but the hardy pepper plants were one of the few things left growing when the family was able to come back to Avery Island in 1865.

Mcllhenny carefully cultivated the first peppers he could gather from these surviving plants and, as his crop grew, he began to experiment. He crushed the peppers, strained the mash, added salt and vinegar, then let the mixture age in wooden barrels.

The resulting sauce was so well received by McIlhenny's family and friends that the obvious next step was to market it. McIlhenny's first account book, for 1868, notes that he sent 350 sample bottles of the sauce to wholesalers who might be interested in selling it.

The wholesalers liked it, and wanted more. But McIlhenny had no more to send. He'd used his entire pepper crop for that year in packaging in 1869, and orders poured in for thousands of bottles, at $1 each, wholesale.

In 1872, only four years after he'd sent out his first samples, McIlhenny opened an office in London to handle the growing demand for Tabasco in Europe.

By April 1907, when the word "Tabasco" became a registered trade mark, Edmund's son, John, was running the company. (Tabasco is the name of a river and state in Mexico.) As part of the trade mark documentation, John certified that the sauce was then being sold throughout the United States and overseas, "particularly England, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, Switzerland, and India."

John turned over the family business to his brothers in 1907, and the company was reorganized with E. A. (Ned) Mcllhenny at the helm. He would remain president for 40 years, to be followed shortly after World War II by Walter Stauper McIlhenny.

Under Walter McIlhenny, production methods were modernized once again (as they have been more recently), but the peppers, products, and process have remained the same.

The peppers are now grown in several other locations, but, at first, the peppers for Tabasco sauce were grown only at Avery Island. Some of them still are. About 200 acres of peppers are planted each year on the island. These peppers mature to a distinctive red color in early August. The pepper's heat comes from the oil in the skin and from the seed core. The flesh of the pepper is sweet. Because ripening occurs in stages on each plant, the pickers must go over every plant about 10 times before a full yield is realized in October.

The peppers are packed in 50 gallon, white-oak barrels, some of which are more than 30 years old. It is believed that, like wine casks, the barrels improve with age. The barrels have wooden covers with small holes bored into them. A thin layer of salt from the Avery Island mine seals the casks. This salt seal prevents air from reaching the peppers but allows fermentation gas to escape.

The barrels rest in warehouses for at least three years. After aging, the mash is transferred to a 50-gallon barrel and mixed with highgrade grain vinegar. Each day for about a month, the barrel is stirred at least 10 times a day. The thick, ruddy brew is then processed through chaff-removing machines. The sauce is ladled out of one barrel at a time and forced through a screen to remove sediment. Then it is ready for bottling.

This article is copyrighted © by the Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser and is used with permission.  This web site was originated through a grant awarded to Carencro High School (Joel Hilbun/Bobbi Marino, Grant Administrators) by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from the Louisiana Quality Education Support Fund - 8(g).