Histoire de la sauce Tabasco (document en anglais)

THE STORY TABASCO SAUCE

TABASCO brand products are made by McIlhenny Company, founded in 1868 on Avery Island, Louisiana. To this day, the company is still family-owned and operated on that very same site.

Sowing the Seeds

According to family tradition, TABASCO® was created in the mid to late 1860s by Edmund McIlhenny. A food lover and avid gardener, McIlhenny was given seeds of « Capsicum frutescens » peppers that had come from Mexico or Central America. On Avery Island in South Louisiana, he sowed the seeds.

The Birth of a Pepper Sauce

Typicall food of the South was bland and monotonous. So Edmund McIlhenny decided to create a pepper sauce to give the food some spice and flavor. Selecting and crushing the reddest peppers from his harvest, he mixed them with salt and let the mixture stand for 30 days in barrels. McIlhenny then blended the mash with French white wine vinegar and aged the mixture for at least another 30 days. After straining it, he transferred the sauce to small cologne-type bottles with sprinkler fitments, which he then corked and sealed in green wax. (The sprinkler fitment was important because his pepper sauce was concentrated and best used when sprinkled, not poured.)

“That Famous Sauce Mr. McIlhenny Makes”

This sauce has proved so popular in its environment that McIlhenny has decided to open a company to market pepper sauce. He harvested his first crop of peppers sold in 1868. The next year, he sent out 658 bottles of sauce at one dollar apiece wholesale to grocers around the Gulf Coast. He labeled it “Tabasco,” a word of Mexican Indian origin believed to mean “place where the soil is humid”. McIlhenny obtained a patent in 1870. Sales grew, and by the late 1870s, he sold his sauce across the U.S. and also in England.

Still Made the Same Way

Over 140 years later, TABASCO® Sauce is made much the same way except now the aging process for the mash is longer – up to three years in white oak barrels – and the vinegar is high-quality distilled vinegar. Labeled in 22 languages and dialects, sold in over 165 countries and territories, added to soldiers’ rations and put on restaurant tables around the globe, it is the most famous, most preferred pepper sauce in the world.

Five Generations Later

TABASCO® Sauce is still made on Avery Island, Louisiana, to this day. In fact, about half of the company’s 200 employees actually live on Avery Island, with many of their parents and grandparents having worked and lived there as well. Anthony Simmons, the current Chairman of the Board and CEO, is the seventh McIlhenny in a chain of direct descendants who have strived to preserve the legacy and traditions of the company’s creator.

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