Finally, it was time to leave New Orleans and go to Texas, but first we stopped at the Tabasco plant on Avery Island, which is not an actual island, but a 2,200 acre site elevated above the surrounding marshes. (Avery Island contains a rock salt deposit “thought to be deeper than Mount Everest is high,” according to the Explore Louisiana website.) Tabasco sauce was created by Edmund McIlhenny, a Southern banker whose career was destroyed by the Civil War and who turned to making hot sauce as a way of making a living enlivening southern cuisine. Of course, the story of Tabasco sauce’s origin has been romanticized and is also disputed; it’s entirely likely that McIlhenny took an acquaintance’s recipe and bottled it as his own.
Whatever the story, the company branched out over the years, and there are 12 varieties of Tabasco sauce on the market at present, from the “family reserve” and a raspberry chipotle to “Scorpion Sauce,” which ranks 50,000 on the Scoville scale. (Regular Tabasco sauce falls between 2,500 and 5,000 on the scale; the actual Tabasco pepper itself falls between 30,000 and 50,000, while Habaneros start at 150,000 Scoville units.)
Next: still toward Texas.