Tabasco sauce
As many as 720,000 two-ounce bottles of Tabasco sauce are filled every day at one factory on Avery Island in southern Louisiana. The recipe behind them is almost austere: vinegar, tabasco peppers, and salt. Yet bottles of it are sold in more than 195 countries and territories, with labels printed in 36 languages and dialects. Behind that reach sit several puzzles. Did the McIlhenny family truly invent the sauce, or did someone get there first? How did one company come to hold a legal claim on a word that once described a whole type of pepper? And what does a simple condiment from a Louisiana island have to do with presidents, soldiers, and astronauts?
The company's official history credits Edmund McIlhenny with producing the first Tabasco sauce in 1868. He was a Maryland-born former banker who had moved to Louisiana around 1840. Not everyone accepts that account. Author Jeffrey Rothfeder, in his book McIlhenny's Gold, points out that parts of the official story are disputed.
Rothfeder's rival candidate is Maunsel White, a New Orleans plantation owner famous for the food at his lavish dinner parties. White had devised his own sauce from a pepper named for the Mexican state of Tabasco, and he bottled it for guests. Rothfeder argues that White was growing tabasco chilies on his plantation in 1849, a full two decades before McIlhenny claimed to have discovered the pepper. A 2007 review of the book by Mark Robichaux of The Wall Street Journal quoted this argument.
A letter to the New Orleans Daily Delta newspaper, dated the 26th of January 1850, gives the claim more weight. It credited White with introducing "Tobasco red pepper" to the Southern United States, and it asserted that McIlhenny was at least inspired by White's recipe. Rothfeder notes that the McIlhenny family has tried to dismiss this possibility.
Jean Andrews goes further in her book Peppers: The Domesticated Capsicums. She cites United States Circuit Court testimony from 1922 stating that White gave some pods and his recipe to his friend Edmund McIlhenny. The handover supposedly happened during a visit to White's Deer Range Plantation. White died in 1862, six years before the date the company gives for its first batch.
When Edmund McIlhenny died in 1890, his eldest son John Avery McIlhenny took over the company. John expanded and modernized the business, but he resigned after only a few years. He left to join Theodore Roosevelt's 1st US Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, the Rough Riders.
His brother Edward Avery McIlhenny stepped in, fresh from an Arctic adventure. A self-taught naturalist, Edward also pushed for expansion and modernization, and he ran the business from 1898 until his death in 1949. His nephew Walter S. McIlhenny then served as president from 1949 until his own death in 1985.
Leadership stayed in the extended family for decades afterward. Edward McIlhenny Simmons ran the company as president and CEO for several years and remained board chairman until his death in 2012. Paul McIlhenny became president in 1998 and was chairman until his death in 2013. In 2012, a cousin named Tony Simmons took over as president. In June 2019, his cousin Harold Osborn was chosen as the next president and CEO.
The company also earned a mark of royal approval. It became one of only a few American companies with a royal warrant certifying it as a supplier to Queen Elizabeth II, one of 850 companies worldwide with such a designation. The wording read "Supplier of Tabasco HM The Queen" under the Master of the Household, and it was granted in 2009.
In 2005, Hurricane Rita struck Avery Island hard. The family responded by building a 17 ft levee around the low side of the factory and investing in back-up generators.
Five decades of courtroom battles across the United States ended in 1948, when a Louisiana court gave McIlhenny the right to use "tabasco" as a proprietary name. Rival sauce makers had long used the word for their own products, and a common ingredient in many of them was the tabasco pepper itself. The Louisiana ruling barred competitors from using what had been a generic name, except when naming an ingredient. McIlhenny won this right even though it lost cases in other courts.
Not every observer finds the claim convincing. Amal Naj, author of Peppers: A Story of Hot Pursuits, researched the lawsuits and concluded that there was not much basis for anyone to claim exclusive rights to the name. The McIlhenny business holds the opposite view. It argues that its peppers and its sauce are distinct enough to deserve a trademark.
The lawsuits slowed after the first wave but never stopped entirely. In the 1970s, Walter Greenleaf, a horticulture professor at Auburn University, developed a new tabasco chili variety and called it "Greenleaf tabasco." His research was funded by taxpayers, so the name threatened the company's exclusive hold on the word. McIlhenny threatened to sue, and the case reached the U.S. attorney general's office. That office settled it by pointing out that the name had been validly published in the International Code of Nomenclature of Cultivated Plants. Years later, a McIlhenny representative asked Greenleaf for seeds of his variety, and Greenleaf gladly agreed, hoping to see more tabasco plants grown.
In 1979, the company's lawyers wrote to Sam Weiner, an artist who went by the name Ms. Tabasco. They claimed that the use of their client's trademark was improper and illegal. That dispute was never resolved.
Pickers in the Tabasco fields carry a standard of ripeness: a little red stick, called le petit bâton rouge. Peppers are harvested by hand, in keeping with company tradition, and only those matching the stick's color enter production. The peppers are ground into a mash on the day of harvest. The mash then goes into white oak barrels with salt. Those barrels previously held whiskey from various distilleries, so each one is decharred, torched, and cleaned to minimize any residual whiskey.
The barrels age in warehouses on Avery Island for up to three years. After that, the mash is strained to remove skins and seeds. The remaining liquid is mixed with distilled vinegar, stirred occasionally for a month, and bottled.
The peppers themselves no longer come only from the island. As demand grew, the company recruited growers throughout Louisiana. During the 1960s, it established farms in several Latin American countries. Today the peppers are cultivated mainly in Central America, South America, and Africa. As of 2013, peppers grown on Avery Island are used to produce seed stock, which is shipped to growers abroad. More predictable weather and plentiful farmland in those places allow a steady year-round supply, which protects against severe weather at any single location.
For many years, the salt in the sauce came from the Avery Island salt dome. It is the largest such structure along the Louisiana coast.
Aging has also produced special editions. A reserve edition uses peppers aged for up to eight years and mixes them with wine vinegar. In 2018, to mark the brand's 150th anniversary, the company released a limited bottling called Tabasco Diamond Reserve Edition. Its peppers were aged for up to 15 years, then blended with sparkling white wine vinegar.
The original red sauce measures between 2,500 and 5,000 Scoville units, the scale for pepper heat. Habanero sauce is hotter, at 7,000 to 8,000. Scorpion sauce is the hottest in the lineup, at 40,000 to 60,000. At the gentle end sits Green Jalapeño sauce, at 600 to 1,200.
Several sauces fall in between. Chipotle sauce, at 1,500 to 2,500, is built on pepper pulp left over from making the original sauce. Cayenne Garlic, at 1,200 to 2,400, blends milder peppers with tabasco peppers. Buffalo Style, at 1,200 to 2,500, is similar to the garlic sauce but has a tangy flavor. The habanero, chipotle, and garlic sauces mix tabasco peppers with other peppers, while the jalapeño variety contains none. None of these sauces gets the three-year aging of the flagship.
The current catalog also includes Family Reserve, Raspberry Chipotle, Roasted Pepper, Salsa Picante, Sriracha, Sweet and Spicy, and Smoked. The only discontinued sauce is a Rocoto pepper sauce.
The seasoning has traveled well beyond bottled sauce. McIlhenny Company has made chocolate, popcorn, nuts, olives, mayonnaise, mustard, steak sauce, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, barbecue sauce, chili sauce, pepper jelly, and Bloody Mary mix. It also permits other brands to advertise Tabasco as an ingredient, a practice called co-branding. Partners have included Spam, Hormel chili, Slim Jim beef sticks, Heinz ketchup, A1 steak sauce, Plochman's mustard, Lawry's salt, Zapp's potato chips, Heluva Good dip, and Vlasic Pickles. Hot & Spicy Cheez-It crackers used Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce for a long time, until Kellogg's replaced it with its own hot sauce in 2018.
The original red sauce keeps for three years when stored somewhere cool and dry. Other flavors have shorter shelf lives.
A 1982 article titled "Pepper Sauce Toxicity" tested the sauce on Sprague-Dawley laboratory rats. The oral median lethal dose was 23.58 mL/kg of body weight in males and 19.52 mL/kg in females. The sauce proved a mild skin irritant and a moderate to severe eye irritant. Vinegar is the main cause of the eye irritation.
Edmund McIlhenny first distributed his sauce in unused cologne bottles bought from a New Orleans glass supplier. The Tabasco bottle is still modeled on those cologne-style containers from the first batch in 1868. Sizes now range from the common two-ounce and five-ounce bottles up to a 1 gal jug for food-service businesses, and down to a miniature bottle.
The tiniest format is a 0.11 US oz portion-control packet. These one-eighth-ounce bottles bear the presidential seal and are served on Air Force One.
Soldiers have long relied on the sauce too. The US military has included it in Meals, Ready-to-Eat since the 1980s, and the Australian, British, and Canadian armies also issue small bottles in their rations. During the Vietnam War, Brigadier General Walter S. McIlhenny issued The Charlie Ration Cookbook. Charlie rations, or "C-rats," were the field meals given to troops. The cookbook came wrapped around a two-ounce bottle of Tabasco sauce in a water-resistant container. It showed soldiers how to turn C-rations into dishes with names like "Combat Zone Burgoo" and "Breast of Chicken under Bullets." Troops also asked their families to send bottles in care packages from home.
Miniature bottles eventually appeared in two-thirds of all MRE menus. The company then issued The Unofficial MRE Cookbook, which used characters from the comic strip Beetle Bailey. It was offered free of charge to US troops.
The sauce has even left the planet. Tabasco appeared on the menu of NASA's Space Shuttle program and went into orbit aboard the shuttles. It was also carried on Skylab and the International Space Station. Astronauts value it as a way to fight the blandness of food in space.
In 1894, composer George W. Chadwick wrote the Burlesque Opera of Tabasco, a musical comedy. Conductor Paul Mauffray revived it in 2018, with support from McIlhenny Company.
The bottle has turned up in film and television for nearly a century. It appears in the 1932 Our Gang short "Birthday Blues" and in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times in 1936. It featured in two James Bond films of the 1970s, The Man with the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me. Sidney Lumet's 1974 film Murder on the Orient Express includes a shot of the iconic bottle. In Back to the Future Part III, a saloon bartender mixes Tabasco into an instant hangover cure he calls "wake-up juice."
The television series Roswell, about alien-human hybrid teenagers, made the sauce a running element. The characters craved foods that were both sweet and spicy and often carried bottles of Tabasco. When the network tried to cancel the show in its first season, thousands of fans mailed bottles of Tabasco to the network in support. The series continued for three seasons.
In 2011, the Canadian documentary series How It's Made devoted an episode to the company and showed how its signature sauce is produced.
In the 2009 Disney animated film The Princess and the Frog, Tiana uses Tabasco in her gumbo. In 2024, the sauce returned in Tiana's Bayou Adventure, the attraction at Disneyland and Disney World. It also appears in the meals served at Tiana's Palace restaurant.
Updated
Common questions
Who created Tabasco sauce?
The McIlhenny Company's official history says Edmund McIlhenny, a Maryland-born former banker, first produced it in 1868. Some authors dispute this and point to Maunsel White, a New Orleans plantation owner who was growing tabasco peppers and making a sauce from them decades earlier.
What is Tabasco sauce made of?
It is made from vinegar, tabasco peppers, and salt. The peppers are ground into a mash, aged with salt in white oak barrels for up to three years, strained, and mixed with distilled vinegar before bottling.
Why do pickers use a little red stick?
The stick, called le petit bâton rouge, is a color guide for ripeness. Peppers that match its red are picked by hand and sent into the sauce production process.
How did McIlhenny come to own the word tabasco?
After about five decades of litigation in courts across the United States, a Louisiana court gave McIlhenny the right to use tabasco as a proprietary name in 1948. Competitors could then use the word only to name an ingredient.
How hot is the original Tabasco sauce?
The original red sauce measures between 2,500 and 5,000 Scoville units. The Scorpion sauce is the hottest in the lineup, at 40,000 to 60,000.
All sources
40 references cited across the entry
- 2Tabasco Hot Sauce and the Fate of Louisiana's ShorelinesMarch 14, 2018
- 4NewsIngredients of a Family FortuneMark Robichaux — October 10, 2007
- 5BookPeppers: The Domesticated CapsicumsJean Andrews — University of Texas Press — 1995
- 6NewsSome Like It Avery HotMarch 24, 2011
- 7NewsTabasco Company CEO–Chairman Ned Simmons dies at 83WWLTV Eyewitness News Report
- 8Paul McIlhennyFebruary 24, 2013
- 10Incoming Tabasco CEO Harold Osborn Embraces his Early StartNew Orleans City Business — July 15, 2019
- 13BookMcIlhenny's Gold: How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco EmpireJeffrey Rothfeder — HarperCollins Publishers — 2009
- 14BookPeppers: a story of hot pursuitsAmal Naj — Knopf — 1992
- 15NewsTabasco's Ties to Football Burn DeepKen Belson — February 3, 2013
- 18NewsThis gourmet Tabasco sauce will set tongues and wallets on fireMegan Wyatt — April 23, 2018
- 21NewsTabasco's First-Ever Mexican-Style Hot Sauce Is About to Level Up Your Favorite Breakfast BurritoMarnie Shure — August 27, 2024
- 22Scoville Scale - Tabascoscovillescale.org
- 24NewsThe eat of Battle – how the worlds armies get fedEmma Graham-Harrison — February 18, 2014
- 25NewsTabasco Brand Spicy Dark Chocolate Paint Can unveiledLiz Gyekye — March 11, 2013
- 26TABASCO® BRAND FOODSERVICE PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONSFebruary 20, 2021
- 27NewsTabasco Hot HistoryBob Edwards — NPR — November 29, 2002
- 29Tabasco and the war against bland military mealsApril 29, 2015
- 30JournalPepper Sauce ToxicityC. L. Winek et al. — 1982
- 31Tabasco turns 150! Here are 10 fun facts about this historic hot sauceJanuary 25, 2018
- 32What No One Tells You About TABASCO®Brittany — March 21, 2018
- 33TabascoFebruary 22, 2014
- 34Roswell's on the ropes, so...can hot sauce save this show?April 7, 2000
- 36My fianceFebruary 25, 2009
- 39VideoHow It's Made: Hot SauceScience Channel — 2022-03-10
- 40The Fiery FamilyKristina Shevory — March 31, 2007