A date with Tabasco, the world’s favourite hot sauce

On a chilly morning inside the original Tabasco factory in Avery Island (Louisiana), my head was getting addled with drop-mathematics. The air was thick with the whiff of pungent chilli (think 30,000–50,000 on the Scoville scale) and I stood there staring at hundreds of two-ounce cologne-type bottles with sprinkler fitments hurtling down the bottling belts like obedient soldiers wearing their signature red cap and diamond-shaped label neatly. The digital clock read: 120,712 bottles produced. Each two-ounce Tabasco bottle has 720 drops of world’s favourite sauce. That’s 869,12,640 drops bottled by noon. If I had stood there until the sirens hooted to mark the end of the working day, the calculator would have conked off. Each day 700,000 Tabasco sauce bottles are produced in the brick-walled factory. That’s 50,40,00,000 Tabasco drops bottled daily!

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The zeroes were too many count, so I rushed back 157 years into the fortuitous day when Edmund McIlhenny, an Irish-American Maryland-born banker used merely three ingredients to create a hot sauce - distilled vinegar, red tabasco pepper and salt. That’s it. The pepper was from his garden and the salt from island’s mines. The story goes that a passing Confederate soldier gifted McIlhenny some seeds from a Mexican tabasco pepper and in 1868, the first hot sauce was rustled and stored in a stoneware jar. McIlhenny christened it Tabasco, a word of Mexican Indian origin that loosely means ‘place where the soil is humid’ or ‘place of the coral or oyster shell’.

McIlhenny recipe was a hit, adding zing to the region’s notoriously bland food. In 1869, 658 bottles of sauce at $1 apiece were shipped to grocers around the Gulf Coast; in 1870, McIlhenny secured a patent for the sauce. Now, Tabasco is sold in more than 195 countries and territories and is packaged in 36 languages and dialects. It is official supplier to the British royal household, is part of ration for soldiers and is even on the official menu of the Space Shuttle. In France, it’s a staple. In England, it’s in the Bloody Mary, on the drinks tray. Tabasco featured in two James Bond films (The Man with the Golden Gun, and The Spy who Loved Me) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times in 1936.

Tabasco seems to be everywhere. Yet, stays very old-fashioned and original - the recipe hasn’t changed in 157 years; the peppers are still handpicked; pickers still ensure ripeness by comparing the colour of the peppers to a small wooden dowel called le petit bâton rouge painted in the signature Tabasco red; all Tabasco peppers are born from the seeds of the mother plant in McIlhenny garden.

Divided into eight different entries, the self-guided tour of the Tabasco factory begins with the Greenhouse where Tabasco, Jalapeno and Habanero pepper plants sit cosy within a grill and comforted by a large fan. Tabasco peppers are, well, Tabasco red, and small while the Habaneros named after the Cuban city of La Habana (Havana) are larger with floral aroma. The next stop is Tabasco Barrel Museum that has 73,000 barrels in the barrel warehouse. Decommissioned white oak bourbon barrels sourced from different distilleries around the country are used to store the pepper/salt mash for up to three years. Each barrel top is sealed with a layer of salt to form a natural protective barrier that also allows for the release of gases produced during the slow fermentation process. After three years, distilled vinegar is added to the mash, aged in oak barrels for 28 days, strained, and bottled. Each carton of Tabasco sauce bears a facsimile of Edmund McIlhenny's signature.

Then, I saw him pinned on the wall in black and white frame. The bearded Edmund McIlhenny who created the sauce but at his death bed did not think of it as a great accomplishment. One room in the brick wall factory chronicles the story of Tabasco, with photographs and tools from the hoary past. A few old advertisements, too, one of which has a soldier holding a Tabasco bottle in his right hand with the punchline: Defending the World Against Bland Food. And reference to an 1894 travelling comic opera titled Burlesque Opera of Tabasco that had funny lyrics, catchy tunes and featured a giant papier-mâché Tabasco bottle and the verse Turn out the town, boys drink it down, hail to the Peer of Tabasco.

Edmund McIlhenny might not have thought of Tabasco as a great accomplishment, but the sauce is everywhere. And oft-talked of. American political satirist PJ O’Rourke said: The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin, Paul Bloom philosophises that Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce while Martyn V Halm believes that Life without risks is like burrito without Tabasco. Bland, but you’ll still fart.

I am not sure about Halm no-Tabasco burrito theory but Tabasco is always on my dinner table. Because a bearded gentleman called Edmund McIlhenny created the world’s best hot sauce.

Good to know:

Getting there: Avery Island is nearly two-hour drive from New Orleans

Timing: 9 am-4 pm,

Self-guided Tabasco factory tour & Museum, Jungle Experience: $15.50 Adults, $12.50 Children (4 and under are free), $13.95 Seniors & Veterans.

Guided tour of the Tabasco factory: $35. Tour should be booked two weeks in advance. Group discounts available.

Cooking Demo Experience: $50 (1 hour). Cash is currently not accepted.