Here is part 3 of 4, and it talks of the rise of the McIlhenny family and Tabasco sauce. Part 4 and the conclusion coming soon.

This information published with the permission of the author, Chuck Evans, and is copyrighted material. The original document can be found at: The Real History of Tabasco®

Edmund McIlhenny (1815-1890), was born and raised in Hagerstown, Maryland. His father was the owner of McIlhenny’s Tavern which sat on the northwest corner of the public square. The elder McIlhenny was also the mayor of Hagerstown. In 1841, allegedly after the death of his father and at the age of 26, Edmund moved to New Orleans.

Edmund prospered after building five banks in New Orleans and began to hob knob with the wealthy of Crescent City where he eventually met Daniel Avery’s daughter, Mary Eliza Avery. Edmund had no farming experience prior to his marriage and settling on the Avery plantation. According to family legend, Edmund McIlhenny maintained a dislike for bland food. The influence of African, Caribbean, and Mexican cultures in the melting pot cuisine of New Orleans, in addition to the unique local preparations of the Acadians/Cajuns as well as the Spanish and French Creole populations in Louisiana, must have generated a crescendo of unique and interesting foods. The availability of fresh and exotic ingredients provided the adventurous epicurean with a playground of flavors and ideas.

Making Tabasco® red pepper sauce is a simple process requiring only three ingredients. Two of the three ingredients were readily available on Avery Island, salt and Tabasco chiles. The third ingredient, vinegar, was easily obtainable. Originally the method used was to ferment the ripe crushed red peppers with salt in stoneware jars; and later in discarded white oak barrels by tapping a hole in the barrel and covering the top of the barrel with rock salt to allow the pepper’s natural gases to escape without permitting air into the barrels. Salt was added regularly to the top of the barrel to further prevent oxygen from reaching the pepper mash. This process permitted the red peppers to naturally ferment without spoiling. When the natural fermentation stopped, the salt would form a hard crust over the top of the barrel.

The barrels are stored for three years to properly complete the fermentation process.[22] Once the salt forms a hard crust, indicating the fermentation process is completed, the barrels are then opened and the bright red mash is removed for processing. The mash concentrate is pounded in a box and strained through a sieve, where the solids are set aside.[23] Vinegar is added to achieve the proper consistency of the finished sauce and then stirred/emulsified for a twenty-eight day period to reduce visible separation of solids and liquids. The resultant pepper sauce is then ready for bottling.

On Avery Island, a McIlhenny “secret recipe” apparently exists, however, the real secret rests with the red Tabasco peppers being picked at the peak of ripeness[24], mashed, and then properly fermented, diluted with vinegar, and stirred at length. The secret is primarily the (lengthy) process, and where time is money; longevity of the manufacture and consistency of red pepper production with allowances for crop failures[25] has placed the McIlhenny Company in a unique position of total saturation of wholesale distribution and the inestimable goodwill of generations of repetitive sales of a timeless classic.

Edmund McIlhenny originally wanted to call his concoction Petite Anse Sauce (after the salt dome which then was known as Isle Petite Anse). But when Avery family members balked at the commercial use of the family Island’s name, he opted to use the name of the red peppers source and sought a trademark for improving his pepper sauce method.

The Salt

The Avery Island salt dome is one of five along the Louisiana Gulf Coast, formed when an ancient sea bed evaporated, depositing pure salt which erupted in large chunks and pushed the ground into a hill. Early native inhabitants knew of the massive salt dome, and during the Civil War, Union troops and Confederate soldiers fought in a tug of war over the precious natural resource. Because of the importance of this natural resource, rural Iberia Parish was a hotly contested area.

The Rub

McIlhenny’s horticultural enterprise may have been interrupted by invading Union troops from captured New Orleans. Union troops invaded the island and captured the salt mines. In 1863 the McIlhenny and Avery families fled, abandoning the plantation to take refuge in Texas. The Union troops plundered Avery mansion and destroyed the plantation fields.

The Spice

When the McIlhenny and Avery families returned to Avery Island in 1865, they found their plantation destroyed and their sugar cane fields in ruin. Allegedly a few volunteer chile plants still survived, providing enough seeds for Edmund McIlhenny to rebuild his pepper patch. However, historical fact and family legend are not exactly clear on whether Edmund began growing peppers before the Civil War or after he returned to the plantation.

Whatever the case, gradually Edmund’s yield of pods increased to the point where he could experiment with his sauce recipe in which ripened chiles were crushed into a mash with added rock salt, aged in stoneware jars and subsequently in fifty-gallon white oak barrels for three years and strained; where the resulting concentrate of pepper sauce was then mixed with vinegar. According to the Mcilhenny Company archives, in 1869 McIlhenny bottled his first batch of aged sauce in new cologne bottles with shaker spouts (not the 350 used cologne bottles as has been passed down as gospel) and then sent the bottles as samples to likely wholesalers.

Allegedly, Edmund passed some of the sauce on to General Hazzard, the former federal administrator for the region, whose distant cousin E.C. Hazzard in New York City, was reputed to be the largest wholesale grocer in the United States. However this was accomplished, it is believed that McIlhenny Tabasco® Sauce was distributed through E.C. Hazzard’s wholesale business. Described as a sauce from a new type of chili pepper and based on the strength of purchase orders that followed, Edmund’s commercial enterprise began in 1869.

According to McIlhenny Company historian and curator, Shane Bernard, PhD:

“However, this somewhat romanticized tale, full of specific and colorful details that imply veracity, is largely untrue. We don’t know for certain how Edmund McIlhenny obtained his original peppers. He never recorded the story for posterity, and his wife, brother-in-law, and children held diverse views on the subject, some mutually exclusive,” said Dr. Bernard. “In addition, 350 recycled cologne bottles containing Tabasco sauce were not sent to market in 1868. Rather, McIlhenny grew his first commercial crop in 1868, but sold no Tabasco sauce until 1869, when he sent 658 new cologne bottles filled with his condiment to market. And we know from McIlhenny’s meticulous business records that the domestic popularity of Tabasco sauce grew slowly over a decade or more, and didn’t successfully export to Europe until the late 1870s.”

The legend continued that the sauce was so popular that orders poured in for thousands of bottles priced at one dollar each, wholesale, which was quite a bit of money in those days. However, distribution overseas did not occur as claimed, but many years later.

In 1870, Edmund McIlhenny filed for a patent for an improvement in his pepper sauce. The improvement was the addition of an ounce of alcohol to every pound of residue which is then agitated and placed under a press, by which the remaining pulp and juice are forced out. This patent was subsequently allowed to expire as Edmund determined that there was no improvement to his Tabasco® Sauce with the addition of alcohol.

After Congress passed the 1905 Federal Registration of Trademarks Used in Commerce between States Act, marks in exclusive lawful use for the ten years preceding the enactment of the statute were entitled to registration. Numerous challenges to the use of the trademark were waged in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s, including B.F. Trappey & Sons Tabasco Pepper Sauce, Ed Bulliard’s Evangeline Tabasco Sauce, H.J. Heinz Company, and the Campbell Soup Company; although third party infringement of the Tabasco® trademark was unlawful.

Subsequently, a 1920 U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana decision confirmed that the McIlhenney Company was the exclusive lawful user of the TABASCO® trademark where the McIlhenny Company was the single source of the product, and therefore, the trademark had acquired secondary meaning as a result of the public’s association of Tabasco® with the McIlhenny Company and entitled to registration under the 1905 Act.

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