McIlhenny Tabasco

Defending against bland food

For my first blog post, I chose to make a day trip to Avery Island, an idyllic place I’d wanted to visit for a long time. Avery Island is not actually an island but a “geological oddity,” according to the McIlhenny company website. The island is a salt dome rising 160 feet above sea level and 2.5 miles across, resulting from a coastal salt marsh repeatedly evaporated during prehistoric times. Saline springs attracted animals such as mastodons, mammoths and sloths, to the islands for thousands of years. The solid rock salt is said to be deeper than Mt. Everest is high! But I digress.

The primary purpose of my journey was to learn more about the process of making Tabasco©, that uniquely flavorful pepper sauce, and to tour Avery Island’s Jungle Gardens. Taking off from New Orleans, I traveled west up Highway 90 through Morgan City and Franklin toward New Iberia through Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge.

I stopped first at the Tabasco© Museum to gather a few historic facts and figures about the legendary spicey sauce. It turns out, the inventor, a Scotsman named Edmund McIlhenny, had eaten a bland entree at Galpin’s restaurant at a time when peppers were out of season and began fantasizing about how to preserve their flavor all year long.

Son of a merchant, tavern keeper, and politician Edmund was born in Maryland and moved to New Orleans in 1841, where he lived in the French Quarter on Exchange Place, (known for its fencing schools) when the city’s economy was booming. Finding success in the newly established banking business, McIlhenny met Mary Eliza Avery, marrying her in June 1859. Mary Eliza was descended from one of the city’s most prominent families. As one might note, the wedding was inauspiciously, set on the eve of the U.S. Civil War.

The Avery family fled New Orleans before Union Gen. David Glasgow Farragut sailed up the Mississippi, capturing New Orleans. The Averys were able to avoid the unpleasant-ness of Union occupation, to reside peacefully 140 miles away on the remote Avery Island. (In fact, the Union Army did invade Avery Island in 1863, seizing their crops.) At once, searching for a new career after the war and satisfying his interest in gastronomy, Edmund planted his first capsicum frutescens (“hot”) pepper seeds in 1868.

Edmund Avery McIlhenny's luxurious Jungle Garden.

After harvesting, he mixed the peppers with salt, grinding them into a mash and placing them in oak barrels for aging. The same three ingredients - peppers, salt and vinegar - are used today to produce 700,500 bottles of hot sauce daily to ship to 195 countries worldwide! Surprisingly, producing hot pepper sauce is a lot like making wine or spirits since the mash is aged for up to three years in repurposed whiskey barrels. I took the opportunity to visit several factory buildings to observe the process and sample one of the best bowls of chili I have ever eaten at the onsite restaurant.

McIlhenny Company makes nine different hot sauces, including Scorpion Sauce

Edmund’s son Edward Avery McIlhenny, born in 1872, decided to convert 170-acres of his estate into a wholesale nursery and landscape architecture business. In the 1930s, Jungle Gardens was turned into a drive-through tourist destination where visitors might appreciate the exotic plants he cultivated there.

The botanical gardens are especially beautiful this time of year with 1,000 different varieties of azaleas, 600 types of camellias, 36 different bamboos, giant reeds, purple wisteria, holly hedge transplanted from Asia; fan, windmill and sago palms; and Live oaks covered whit Resurrection ferns and Spanish moss.

When President Grover Cleveland visited, Edward named a 300-year-old oak tree for him.

Spanish moss drips from tree branches on the landscaped estate.

Since fashionistas in the 1920s were demanding feathers to adorn hats and stoles, the population of snowy egrets had diminished. Edward therefore dammed a wet area, creating a small pond to build Bird City wildfowl refuge and rookery for the endangered species in 1895 where they have been breeding ever since. The 25,000-acre preserve is also home to rabbits, deer, bear and alligators - beware!