Did Hillary Clinton go a Scoville unit too far with her hot sauce quip?
Given the cultural history of the condiment, it was probably a bad idea
Thanks to the trail that “Hot Sauce-Gate” has blazed through the media in the last 24 hours, the country’s political junkies already know that Hillary Clinton stands accused of pandering to the black vote by invoking the spicy stuff.
What they might not know is how hot sauce, a culinary export of the American south, came to be a “black” condiment — a gastronomic messenger of black culture that a white politician might be careful appropriating.
On New York’s biggest hip-hop radio station Monday, a DJ asked Clinton what one item she always carries with her. “Hot sauce,” she responded. When the DJ and his co-host, incredulous and in unison, said “Really?,” Clinton replied, “Yes!”
Immediately the internet, including the political minds at TMZ, blasted Clinton for attempting to “snag” New York’s black vote a day ahead of the state’s primary. On Tuesday morning, Donald Trump joined in. After a “Fox & Friends” host asked him about Clinton’s comments, Trump replied, “She carries hot sauce like I carry hot sauce. It’s just, I don’t know, so phony, and so pandering and so terrible.”
Her comments, perhaps Hillary-esque in their stiffness, weren’t phony, it turns out: Clinton is an avowed and well-documented fan of hot sauce, something a cadre of hot sauce “truthers” quickly pointed out on Twitter. But, given some recent and not-so-recent history, her hot-sauce-comments might, indeed, have seemed a tad ingratiating — even though the hot sauce Clinton carried at the time of the interview was Ninja Squirrel, an Asian-style sriracha sauce made by Whole Foods.
In February, Beyoncé debuted “Formation,” a track that grabbed the world’s attention at the Super Bowl with a kind of anthemic call to embrace black identity. Some of its lyrics:
I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros
I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils
Earned all this money but they never take the country out me
I got a hot sauce in my bag, swag
Critics heaped praise on the song, and people listened. Clinton may have, too. (She’s professed to being a Beyoncé fan.) But Queen Bey’s hot sauce lyric, some writers have noted, has more to do with the symbolic potency of hot sauce than a tasty flavoring you splash around for some extra heat.
“Beyoncé telling us she has hot sauce in her bag isn’t just a line about how she likes her food,” wrote Mikki Kendall, for Eater. “It’s a relic, and a reminder.”
When Africans were brought to the New World as slaves, they were already accustomed to spicy foods, having eaten “warming spices,” including cardamom and ginger, as part of their everyday diet. Once in America, they were introduced to the chilis of Mexico and points south that were brought to the US after the Mexican-American War.
“They were hard wired for chilies from the New World,” said Adrian Miller, author of the 2013 book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time.
But white plantation owners also learned that chiles had medicinal qualities. One plantation owner, Maunsell White, gave chilies to his slaves during an outbreak of cholera. When the disease disappeared, he shared seeds with other slave owners and eventually made a sauce he sold commercially.
“He came up with what many believe is the first hot sauce,” Miller said, explaining that people would even gargle with it to cure strep throat.
Eventually a medicine morphed into a condiment.
Like other poor, marginalized or resource-strained communities, southern blacks, before and after slavery, often ate “hardship” foods — the things no one else would eat. To make them tastier, they flavored pots with a chunk of ham hock or simmered greens for hours, before adding some liquid fire.
Hot sauce made food — and, by extension maybe, life — palatable.
Decades after slavery’s end, roughly 6 million black southerners moved north and west in the Great Migration, bringing culinary traditions with them. The most transportable, the one most easily toted along to make food taste like home or furtively dashed on inferior, insipid cooking, was hot sauce.
“There may be white Beyoncé fans who also carry around their own personal bottles of hot sauce, but hearing her say she has hot sauce in her bag isn’t a shout-out to them,” Kendall wrote. “She’s talking to the Southern and Great Migration Black Americans listening — to them, to us, it hearkens to home.”
But, Kendall adds, hot sauce was more than a vehicle for culinary nostalgia. During Jim Crow, black people could buy food from white-owned restaurants, but they couldn’t eat there. That meant they had to bring their own utensils and condiments.
Everyone’s mom or grandmom had hot sauce in their bag. It became a kind of totemic, culinary elixir — a powerful reminder that black southerners couldn’t actually go home again.
And it was something most white people wouldn’t touch. “It was frowned upon by wealthy elites, because in the age of French cooking, it was all about balance,” Miller said. “Using a spicy condiment was looked down on.”
“It’s really only recently that you really start to see hot sauce going mainstream, to the point now where it’s everywhere,” Miller added, “and there’s a race to make it hotter.”
Clinton may like a little fire in her food, and she’s not alone. Hot sauce sales have climbed 150% since 2000. She might douse it on everything she eats. But announcing she carries it around in her bag, at least in today’s political climate, might have gone a dash over the line.
