Joriki JediEarth
Aug 31, 2018 · 2 min read
TABASCO????????

Although the name comes from the MEXICAN state of TABASCO, the sauce is a U.S product by McIlheny company. According to company myth Tabasco sauce was first produced in 1868 by Edmund McIlheny, a Maryland-born former banker who was moved to Louisiana around 1840.

However, as Jeffery Rothfeder’s book “McIlheny’s Gold” points out, at least some of the self-promotional McIlheny company official history is fictitous. An October 10, 2007 book review by mark robichaux in The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 10 , 2007 , quotes that book:

“The story actually begins in the Pre-Civil war era with a New Orleans plantation owner named Maunsel White, who was famous for the food served at his sumptuous dinner parties. Mr. White’s table no doubt groaned with the region’s varied fare-drawing inspiration from european, carribean and cajun sources bot one of his favourite sauces was of his own divising made from the pepper named for it’s origin in the mexican state of tabasco. White added the sauce to various dishes and bottled it for his guests. Although the McIlheny’s have tried to dismiss the possibility it seems clear now that in 1849 a full two decades before Edmund McIlheny proffessed to discover the tabasco pepper, White was already growing tabasco chillies on his plantation.

Rothfeder cited a Jan. 26, 1850 letter to the new orleans daily delta newspapaer crediting the slave owner banker politician maunsel white as having introduced “Tabasco Red Pepper” to the southern united states and asserting that the mcilhenny sauce was at least inspired by whites recipe. Jean Andrews, in her book “Peppers: The Domesticated Capsicums,” goes further to declare- citing the united states circuit testimony from 1922- that prior to his death in 1862, white gave some pepper pods along with his sauce recipe to his friend edmund mcilhenny inittially used dicarded cologne bottles sourced from a New Orleans glass supplier. On his death in 1890, McIlihenny was succeeded by his eldest son, John Avery McIlhenny, who expanded and modernized the business, but resigned after only a few years in order to join Theodore Roosevelt’s 1st US volunteer cavalry regiment, the ROUGH RIDERS. On Johns departure, brother Edward Avery McIlhenny, a self-taught naturalist fresh from an arctic adventure, assumed control of the company and also focused on expansion and moderniztion, running the business from 1898 until his death 1949.

Joriki JediEarth

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