| Much of what we know about now-extinct brands of hot sauces comes from bottle collectors. Other sources of information about early hot sauces are city directories and newspapers, which often contained ads for sauces. We know from these sources that the first bottled cayenne sauces appeared in Massachusetts around 1807. These were probably homemade and similar to the English sauces with the silver labels. Sometime between 1840 and 1860, J. McCollick & Company of New York City produced a Bird Pepper Sauce in a large cathedral bottle that was nearly eleven inches tall! This sauce is significant because it was probably made with the wild chiles called chiltepins or bird peppers. We also know that in 1849, England's Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce was first imported into the United States via the port of New York. That year was important in the history of hot sauces because it marked the first recorded crop of tabasco chiles, the vital ingredient of McIlhenny Company's Tabasco Pepper Sauce. That crop was grown by a prominent Louisianan, Colonel Maunsell White on his Deer Range Plantation. Tobasco was an early misspelling of Tabasco, the Mexican state. Colonel White manufactured the first hot sauce from the "Tobasco" chiles and advertised bottles of it for sale in 1859. About this time, he gave some chiles and his sauce recipe to a friend, Edmund McIlhenny, who promptly planted the seeds on his plantation on Avery Island. In 1863, McIlhenny and his family abandoned their Avery Island plantation to take refuge in San Antonio, Texas. When the McIlhenny family returned to Avery Island in 1865, they found their plantation destroyed and their sugar cane fields in ruin. However, a few chile plants survived, providing enough seeds for McIlhenny to rebuild his pepper patch. Gradually, his yield of pods increased and he could experiment with his sauce recipe, in which mashed chiles were strained, and the resulting juice was mixed with vinegar and salt and aged in fifty-gallon white oak barrels. In 1868, McIlhenny packaged his aged sauce in 350 used cologne bottles and sent them as samples to likely wholesalers. The sauce was so popular that orders poured in for thousands of bottles priced at one dollar each. In 1870, McIlhenny obtained a patent on his Tabasco Brand hot pepper sauce and by 1872 had opened an office in London to handle the European market. The increasing demand for Tabasco sauce caused changes in the packaging of the product as the corked bottles sealed with green wax were replaced by bottles with metal tops. From an excavated wreck of the good ship Bertrand, dated 1874, we know that Western Spice Mills of St. Louis was making hot sauce around that time because 173 of their bottles were uncovered. That same year (some say 1875), Eugene R. Durkee of Brooklyn, New York, applied for a patent on a hexagonally-shaped "Chilli Sauce" bottle. Although the patent application survives, no actual bottle has ever been found, but E.R. Durkee & Company became a rather large spice and condiment company and the brand name exists to this day. Around this same time, W.K. Lewis & Co. in Boston was producing a pepper sauce in a square cathedral-shaped bottle. In 1877, Willam H. Railton, a Chicago businessman who owned the Chicago Preserving Works, began using a maltese cross-shaped label for table sauces "prepared from a Mexican formula." He applied for a trademark in 1883, and by 1884 he was buying large ads for his Chili Colorow Sauce. During the 1880s and '90s, several hot sauces sprang up, including C&D Peppersauce, manufactured by Chace and Duncan in New York City in 1883, but we have nothing left but the bottle. Sometime around 1900, the Bergman and Company Pioneer Pickle Factory in Sacramento, California, began selling Bergman's Diablo Pepper Sauce in five-inch tall bottles with narrow necks that resembled the typical hot sauce bottle of today. In 1893, it is said that Popie Devillier developed his legendary hot sauce Hotter 'n Hell. Born in Southern Louisiana in the "Bayou Country", Arthur "Popie" Devillier left home at 13, settling into work as a lumberjack in one of the area logging camps. According to his late great grandson, Kent Cashio, Popie Devillier, became a cook for a lumber camp, taught the ropes by a French cook and a Choctaw Indian assistant. Relying on this Choctaw/Cajun influence he created the sauce blending eight spices, including cloves, which many of the workers placed in their mouth after a meal to ease the burn and soothe the tongue. He then slow cooked the sauce to yield a spicy hot, yet full flavored hot sauce. The sauce is not only a hot sauce, but a marinade and an injector for meat and wild game. Hotter 'n Hell was passed down the family tree for more than ninety years, until 1992 when Mr. Cashio, seeing the potential in the market for a recipe that had endeared itself to the lumberjacks and families of the former French-owned Louisiana Territory, introduced the product to the public as Popie's Hotter 'n Hell Sauce. Tragically, Kent Cashio became terminally ill and in May, 1994, sold Popie's to Cafe Companies, Inc. An instant hit, Cafe Louisiane Hotter 'n Hell Sauce, now made in Baton Rouge, carries the legend of Popie to the future generations of customers at the Cafe Louisiane Cajun Seafood and Oyster Bar, as well as throughout the Bayou Country and beyond. From hot sauce bottle collectors we know that Koonyik Chilies Sauce appeared along the west coast of the United States around 1900. About the same time, a Detroit company, Horton-Cato, manufactured Royal Pepper Sauce in a bottle with a bulbous bottom. And sometime shortly after 1889, Heinz produced Heinz's Tabasco Pepper Sauce in a elegant bottle; but alas, even Heinz couldn't compete with the "real" Tabasco sauce. After the death of Edmund McIlhenny in 1890, the family business was turned over to his son John, who immediately inherited trouble in the form of a crop failure. John attempted to locate tabasco chiles in Mexico but could not find any to meet his specifications. Fortunately, his father had stored sufficient reserves of pepper mash, so the family business weathered the crisis. However, that experience taught the family not to depend solely upon tabasco chiles grown in Louisiana. Today, tabascos are grown under contract in Honduras, Colombia, and other Central and South American countries, and the mash is imported into the United States in barrels. John McIlhenny was quite a promoter and traveled all over the country publicizing his family's sauce. In 1898, another Louisiana entrepreneur (and former McIlhenny employee) named B. F. Trappey began growing tabasco chiles from Avery Island seed. He founded the company B. F. Trappey and Sons and began producing his own sauce, which was also called "Tabasco." The McIlhenny family responded by receiving a trademark for their Tabasco® brand in 1906. The trademark did not deter other companies from using the name Tabasco in their products. In 1911, the Joseph Campbell Company began selling Campbell's Tabasco Ketchup and described it as "the appetizing piquancy of Tabasco Sauce in milder form." Obviously noticing the success of McIlhenny's Tabasco® Pepper Sauce, other companies sprang up all over the country. Charles E. Erath of New Orleans began manufacturing Extract of Louisiana Pepper, Red Hot Creole Peppersauce in bottles nearly eight inches tall in 1916. A year later, La Victoria Foods began manufacturing Salsa Brava in Los Angeles, California. In Louisiana in 1923, Baumer Foods began manufacturing of Crystal Hot Sauce and in 1928 Bruce Foods started making Original Louisiana Hot Sauce--two brands that are still in existence today. The Louisiana hot sauce boom continued when, in 1929, Trappey's expanded to two plants, one in Lafayette and one in New Iberia. That same year, the McIlhenny family won a trademark infringement suit against the Trappeys. From that time on, only the McIlhenny sauce could be called "Tabasco," and competitors were reduced to merely including tabasco chiles in their list of ingredients. In 1941, Henry Tanklage formed La Victoria Sales Company to market a new La Victoria salsa line. He introduced red taco sauce, green taco sauce, and enchilada sauce--the first of their kind in the United States. He took over the entire La Victoria operation in 1946, which today has ten different hot sauces covering the entire salsa spectrum, including Green Chili Salsa and Red Salsa Jalapeña. In Texas, salsa manufacturing began in 1947. David and Margaret Pace operated a small food packing operation in the back of their liquor store in San Antonio. They were manufacturing syrups, salad dressings, and jellies and sold their products door-to-door. David, by trial and error, began to make picante sauce and test it on his friends. When it was introduced commercially, it was so popular that the Paces were forced to drop all other products and concentrate on the picante sauce. But the salsa business was not easy. During the '40s and '50s, hot sauces were sold exclusively in small grocery stores, and manufacturers were always searching for new products. In 1952 Henry Tanklage of La Victoria Foods invented and introduced the first commercial taco sauce in the United States. And in 1955, La Preferida began manufacturing a line of salsas. A wave of food change swept the country in the 1970s. Sometimes called the "whole foods movement," the trend emphasized cooking with fresh, unadulterated ingredients. Vegetarianism increased in popularity, health food stores sprang up all over, and a new concept in selling food was launched--the gourmet retail shop, which specialized in selling exotic, imported foods and products from smaller manufacturers that were not available in the large supermarkets. The stage was set for yet another boom in hot sauces, and this one was led by the smaller manufacturers. Between the years of 1982 and 1987, Mexican sauce sales jumped sixteen percent, and Mexican sauces suddenly were at the top of the sauce and gravy category. Nelson Thall, president of the Marshall McLuhan Center for Global Communications, has a unique explanation for the ever-increasing popularity of hot sauces and other fiery foods: "Americans are becoming more 'tribal' in the their tastes," said Thall. "And tribal Third World cultures embrace spicier foods, as opposed to the traditional ketchup-like blandness preferred by Western cultures." |
