History of Tabasco sauce

Edmund Mcllhenny was born in Maryland. Mcllhenny arrived in New Orleans in 1841 and became a banker.

Edmund Mcllhenny encountered a Mexican-American War veteran on the streets of New Orleans around 1850.

The soldier had recently returned to the United States from Mexico. The ex-soldier, named Friend Gleason, gave Edmund a few pepper pods collected during his recent travels in Mexico.

Edmund liked the peppers so much that he planted a few seeds on his plantation on Avery Island, Louisiana and using their fruit to0 invent a fiery pepper sauce that he called ‘Tabasco’.

The manufacturing process was complicated and time –consuming. Mcllhenny mashed the peppers with Avery Island salt, fermented them for thirty days, added French white wine vinegar and let them age at least another month.

He then strained the sauce into narrow-necked cologne-type bottles. Mid to late 1860s he began producing red peppers from those seeds and he began to believe that the flavor and spice he found in those peppers would be a great addition to the regional cuisine.

Mcllhenny named it Tabasco, a word of Mexican Indian origin, began marketing in 1868, and patented it in 1870.

In 1870 he produced 1,012 bottles in 1871, 2,896 bottles, and in the banner year of 1872, 15,084 bottles. It was said that Mcllhenny first sold bottled Tabasco sauce for 1$ per bottle wholesale in 1868.

Prior to the coming of the railroad in the 1880s, Edmund shipped his finished cause by horse and wagon to nearby New Iberia.
History of Tabasco sauce