Among my treasured books on food is a volume called “The Plantation Cookbook”.
It was sent to me for Christmas many years ago by Walter McIlhenny, the late
chairman of the McIlhenny Company in Louisiana which produces the world famous
Tabasco sauce. As I mentioned some weeks ago we never met in person but through
a correspondence of many years developed a friendship which was unfortunately
terminated when Walter died in the nineteen eighties.
The late General Walter McIlhenny. By long
tradition, a member of the family always weighs the crop, thus deciding what
each picker is to be paid.
Walter was one of the last scions of the company, which until his death was
strictly a family affair. The family saga started in 1818 when a certain John
Graig Marsh from New Jersey came to Louisiana and purchased part of an island in
the alligator invested swamps west of New Orleans on the edge of the Mississippi
delta. What the man did not know was that it was not an ordinary island but one
of five salt domes which were pushed up by some geological phenomena in the very
distant past. The island was about six miles in circumference and when Marsh and
his wife lived there it had no proper name yet. John Marsh originally planted
sugar cane there for the then so lucrative sugar/rum trade, but he could have
hardly avoided the salt deposits and it seems that he already mined it in those
days.
The Marshes had a daughter named Sarah, who married a Baton Rouge judge by the
name of Daniel Dudley Avery, who eventually bought the whole island and since
then it was - and still is - called Avery island. This marriage pro-duced
several children and the eldest daughter married a self made banker from New
Orleans called Edmund McIlhenny, who was of Scottish-Irish descent. This was in
1859 just before the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.
In the first years of that conflict the family was selling the salt to the
Confederacy but the Union forces invaded the island in 1863 to get the salt, and
the Avery family, including their son in law Edmund, fled to take refuge in
Texas where they stayed for two years before they were able to return to their
beautiful realm. They found it in shambles, the house was destroyed as well as
the cane fields. The salt works were in disrepair and the whole country was in a
state of deep depression.
There are several versions of how the now so famous chillies arrived on the
island. The following is the original family version as sent to me by the late
Walter McIlhenny himself, which we may assume is the only true one.
Just before the outbreak of hostilities between the North and the South, a wary
traveller and friend of Edmund passed on his way from Mexico and stayed at the
family’s home for a while. When he left he gave Edmund a handful of dried chilli
pods and said to him: “You will find that these will add exceptional flavour to
your food.” The Avery’s planted the seeds in their kitchen garden where they
flourished and even survived the devastation of the civil war.
When the family returned from their exile after the war they were bankrupt. Old
man Avery had put all his funds in confederate money which had become worthless
when the war was won by the North. They had to start from scratch again and try
to make a living. Edmund noticed that there were still chilli plants in the
garden and wondered if he could make a peppery sauce with them which would be
tasty enough to be saleable. Chilli plants are self seeding plants but to make
them produce more fruit they have to be seeded properly and planted out. Edmund
did this and finally came up with a satisfactory recipe for a sauce which he
bottled in empty Eau de Cologne bottles the pre-war ladies had cast away. Some
of these he gave away to friends and neighbours which were most enthusiastic and
soon called it “That wonderful sauce McIlhenny makes.”
According to Edmund’s diary, it took him quite a while to come up with a proper
name for his sauce and he finally decided on the name Tabasco, after the region
of Mexico where this particular species of peppers come from . The name
“Tabasco” literally means “Land where the soil is humid.” The modern bottle, its
shape and the green band around the neck is still a copy of those Eau de Cologne
bottles of yore.
When Edmund died in 1890, his son John, the father of the late president Walter,
took over and he introduced many novel ideas into the company and the production
of salt and Tabasco sauce. He made more propaganda for the sauce and travelled
all over the US giving away the small bottles of sauce. He also started to
produce it on a much larger scale until he joined the military and handed over
the reigns of the business to his younger brother Edward or Ned. This
enterprising man had already made a name as an explorer as he had organised an
Arctic expedition. He was a naturalist who started a bird sanctuary on the
island with the purpose to protect the snowy egret from becoming extinct, as it
was fashionable in those days for ladies to wear lots of feathers on their hats
and the most popular were ostrich and egret feathers.
It was the late Brigadier General of the US Marine corps - retired - Walter
McIlhenny who took over from his uncle Edward and started to market the Tabasco
sauce overseas. It was Walter’s cousin Edward junior, who is now one of the
family trio which runs the company, who said about Walter shortly before he
passed away, “Walter’s greatest contri-bution is that he was able to hold the
group together. He has been scrupulously fair.”
These days, Tabasco sauce is not only bottled on Avery Island but also in other
countries around the world. The sauce is made like a vintage wine. The chillies
are fully ripened in the late summer but not all at the same time. They have to
be bright dark red and unblemished. The seeds are removed and the pulp is aged
for three seasons in casks with rock salt on top to make them breathe, and the
final stage is to add spirit vinegar and salt. After that they are shipped and
bottled.
Tabasco sauce has also become very popular here in Thailand where people like
their food hot, and many of my Thai customers ask for it when they have a steak.
It is also used in “Bloody Marys” as well as other dishes.
