Tabasco peppers are picked by matching them against a little red stick
To judge whether a pepper is ripe enough for Tabasco, pickers hold it up to a small painted stick called le petit baton rouge. Only peppers matching its shade go into the sauce. The mash is then salted and aged in old whiskey barrels on Louisiana's Avery Island for up to three years.
The company's official story credits Edmund McIlhenny, a Maryland-born former banker, with creating the sauce in 1868. Writer Jeffrey Rothfeder argues the tale is incomplete: New Orleans plantation owner Maunsel White, famed for his dinner parties, was growing tabasco chilies by 1849 and bottling a sauce for guests. Court testimony from 1922, cited by author Jean Andrews, claims White handed McIlhenny pods and his recipe before dying in 1862. McIlhenny's first bottles were unused cologne bottles from a New Orleans glass dealer, and today's bottle still copies that shape.
Production has barely changed in spirit. Peppers once came only from Avery Island; since the 1960s farms in Latin America have supplied them, with island-grown plants providing the seed stock, and picking is still done by hand. After aging, the mash is strained of skins and seeds, blended with distilled vinegar, stirred occasionally for a month, and bottled. Barrels are scraped and torched first to remove leftover whiskey. For the brand's 150th anniversary in 2018, a Diamond Reserve used peppers aged up to 15 years with sparkling white wine vinegar.
Keeping the name took decades. The word tabasco was once generic, but after five decades of lawsuits a Louisiana court granted McIlhenny exclusive use in 1948, even though other courts had ruled against it. When an Auburn horticulturist named a new pepper variety Greenleaf tabasco in the 1970s, the company threatened action until the US attorney general's office backed the name.
The sauce travels widely: Air Force One stocks tiny bottles stamped with the presidential seal, Vietnam-era troops received a cookbook wrapped around a bottle, and astronauts have taken it to Skylab and the International Space Station.
Source: Tabasco sauce
