Chuck Evans of Montezuma Brand has talked with us a great deal about the fascinating history and lore that has been associated with the Tabasco brand and McIlhenny family since its founding more than a century ago. Chuck also gave us the heads-up about a new book about the Tabasco brand called McIlhenny’s Gold, published by Harper Collins. As ones who appreciate the history behind the history, we might very well have to pick up a copy of this book…since we missed our chance at getting an early copy of this book before it went to print. Here’s an article excerpt from the Opinion Journal that talks a little bit about the book and the company:

Ingredients of a Family Fortune

The hot story of Tabasco sauce.

BY MARK ROBICHAUX
Wednesday, October 10, 2007

From the time I tapped the first few drops of Tabasco onto the boiled crawfish I caught as a boy in south Louisiana’s bayous, it was love at first bite. I can remember the slender bottle with its red cap and diamond-shaped label standing in quiet superiority alongside the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table. Tabasco was a staple of my Cajun home, and I have cooked faithfully with it ever since. Millions of Americans–most of them, it is safe to say, without a Cajun background–seem to share my enthusiasm. How did Tabasco become, so to speak, so hot?

As the legend goes, a Louisiana banker named Edmund McIlhenny–his family’s Avery Island plantation in ruins after the Civil War–took the seeds of a Mexican pepper given to him by a Confederate soldier and began a condiment business in 1869, the forerunner of today’s company and the origins of a brand name now recognized throughout the world.

In “McIlhenny’s Gold,” Jeffrey Rothfeder, a former BusinessWeek editor, sets himself the ambitious goal of testing the truth of this founding legend and of drawing a historical profile of one of the oldest–and most profitable–family businesses in U.S. history. He does an impressive job of assembling historical documents, ancient newspaper clippings and interviews with former factory workers, competitors and family members–though no McIlhennys actively involved in the business on Avery Island would cooperate. He admits that sometimes “people’s inherited recollections of decades- or centuries-old incidents were all I had to work with.” But the result is valuable as a general corrective to a record overloaded with secondhand tales.

Today, Mr. Rothfeder reports, McIlhenny Co. is a business with $250 million in annual revenue, still closely held despite buyout offers of $1 billion. The company produces as many as 600,000 two-ounce bottles of its signature product a day, selling it in more than 100 countries, with profit margins, according to the author, of 25% or more. And yet for all the product’s familiarity, the family behind the sauce remains something of a mystery, still operating from remote Avery Island, part of southern Louisiana’s Acadian Gothic landscape of high canopies and moss-hung cypress trees.

Click here to read the rest of the source article

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