Pepper paradise
Well, this year my wife, mother-in-law and I headed to southwest
Louisiana and Avery Island, the center of the hot pepper world.
For 138 years, on this little island among the bayous, the
McIlhenny family has used a secret recipe to make Tabasco pepper
sauce.
Yes, the peppers are here, along with the factory and a funky
Tabasco-themed gift shop complete with a variety of pepper
products and rollicking Cajun music.
Besides being the home of Tabasco Sauce, Avery Island has a
fascinating natural history. The “island” is really a little
hill created by the upwelling of ancient salt deposits beneath
the Mississippi delta. At its highest point, it’s only 152 feet
above sea level.
Civil War survivor
When Edmund McIlhenny returned to his Avery Island plantation
after the Civil War, he was delighted to find that the special
red peppers he had planted in his garden before the war had
survived.
He began to experiment with making pepper sauce for Christmas
presents and hit on a formula that worked. He crushed the
ripest,
reddest peppers, mixed a half-cup of local salt with each gallon
and aged the mixture in crockery jars for 30 days.
Then he added fine, French wine vinegar and aged the sauce
another 30 days before straining and bottling it in surplus
perfume bottles (hence the classic shape).
Sold like hot, uh, sauce
McIlhenny chose a Central American Indian name for the product,
“Tabasco,” and shipped the first batch of 350 bottles in 1868.
The hot sauce took off like wildfire, and orders came in faster
than they could be filled.
Tabasco has since become the definitive seasoning sauce,
offering people around the world a taste of south Louisiana.
While Tabasco Sauce production involves salting and fermenting
the chili mash, gardeners can enjoy growing these fiery, tasty
chilies at home for their own fresh sauces and spicy dishes.
Many garden centers have tabasco plants. These small, pointed
chilies grow on branching plants 2 to 3 feet tall. They do best
where summers are long and hot.
Hot little pods
Each plant can bear 100 erect little chili pods that color up
from yellow to orange to red. Tabasco chilies have a unique,
dry-hot, smoky taste combined with fiery pungency for unbeatable
flavor.
On Avery Island, the 250-acre McIlhenny estate is also home to
20,000 snowy egrets. Along with the bird sanctuary are the
Jungle
Gardens: vast expanses of gigantic live oaks draped with Spanish
moss, huge hollies that form a canopy road, quiet meditation
gardens and a sunken garden with rare, exotic palms. The
photographic paradise contains other animals, including the
ever-present alligator.
This garden-loving chilihead found at Avery Island a perfect
blend of beauty and taste. Now, let’s see, the little hotel next
to the Evangeline Oak in St. Martinville that serves that great
crab bisque….
