Avery Island, Where Salt and Pepper Meet…
Born in the aftermath of the American Civil War, McIlheny’s Tabasco can be found everywhere from diners to military rat packs in the United States
Article by Oliver Barnham
On almost every table of every restaurant in the USA there is a basket holding salt, pepper…. and a small bottle of Tabasco sauce. It’s not just in America that you find this stuff. It’s ubiquitous. It’s everywhere! If you haven’t heard of Tabasco or tried it yet, you are one of the few people on the planet who hasn’t.
Tabasco is the world’s ‘gold standard’ for pepper sauces. A couple of drops will add flavour to the most ordinary of dishes; though an over-dose will blow your ears off. And about half a million bottles a day flow from an elegant little factory in a beautiful coastal setting known as Avery Island, about 80 miles south-west of New Orleans.
Avery is not really an island. Rather, it is an area of high ground (actually a natural salt dome) located in the Louisiana wet-lands close to the historic town of New Iberia. Originally known as Ile Petite Anse (‘Little Cove’) the land was purchased in the early years of the 19th century by Judge Avery, a prominent Baton Rouge jurist, in honour of whom it was re-named.
But to start at the beginning. Tabasco sauce was the inspiration of a Mr Edmund McIlheny, a New Orleans banker who lost all his money (and his bank) during the American civil war. In 1858, just before the war, Edmund had married Mary Avery, the daughter of Judge Avery, and as the fighting erupted, the Averys and McIlhenys sought safety on Avery Island.
When the war ended in 1865, the families were in deep trouble. The economy of the South was in ruins, Edmund’s bank had collapsed and money was short. In desperation he searched for an alternative livelihood… and found an unlikely solution. A friend (no-one remembers who) had given Edmund some red pepper seeds which he planted on Avery Island where they flourished mightily. Edmund then had the brilliant idea of cultivating them commercially and using them to make a condiment to improve the taste of the poor food that was all that was then available.
In the years that followed, Edmund experimented with ways to convert red peppers into a palatable sauce, and in 1868 he perfected his recipe and harvested his first large-scale crop. The rest, as they say, is history. At first, Edmund supplied his sauce (in cologne bottles) to groceries and restaurants in New Orleans; and it wasn’t long before he was selling it further afield.
To promote his hot sauce, Edmund called it ‘Tabasco’ - named after a state in Mexico famous for peppers and spices, and where his seeds probably originated. From the earliest days, Edmund and his successors took their advertising seriously - witness a range of eye-catching McIlheny marketing material from the 1880s onwards.
A particular ‘target audience’ for McIlheny advertising has been the American military; and for the past hundred years, Tabasco sauce has been available in army mess halls. During the Vietnam conflict the McIlheny company began supplying miniature bottles of their sauce for inclusion in ration packs to improve the edibility of the infamous Meal, Combat, Individual (MCI) otherwise known as C- Rations and the custom continues. The McIlheny archive contains thousands of testimonials from thankful soldiers!
The ‘secret’ Tabasco recipe was (and still is) to pick peppers at a perfect shade of red, then immediately crush them, mix them with salt and age them in oak barrels for up to three years. This ‘mash’ is then blended with vinegar for two or three weeks and strained to remove the pepper skins and seeds. The finished sauce is then bottled, capped, labelled and ready for shipment.
Only a small percentage of the peppers used to make Tabasco are grown on Avery Island, and most come from small farms in Africa and South America. But no matter where they originate, all find their way to the Avery factory.
These days, the McIlheny company produces many different products, but the mainstay of the business is still their range of pepper sauces. Four types of peppers are used to produce their key brands: The tabasco pepper (used in the classic Tabasco Original Red Pepper Sauce), the green jalapeno pepper (used in the Tabasco Green Sauce), the habanero pepper (used for the very hot Tabasco Habanero Sauce), and a smoked red jalapeno pepper (for Tabasco Chipotle Sauce).
The Avery Island ‘works’ where the peppers are processed resemble a neat college campus with fine neo-Victorian buildings set in acres of attractive grounds. Visitors are welcome to tour the greenhouses where pepper plants are grown, the barrel sheds where mash is stored, the blending rooms and the bottling plant. There is also an excellent restaurant and (of course) a shop.
But Avery Island is more than just a business park. The setting is stunning and plants and wildlife thrive in all their forms. Luckily for Louisiana, Edmund’s second son Edward Avery McIlheny was a passionate naturalist and conservationist. Besides running the Tabasco sauce business for many years, he established a plant nursery and a large-scale landscaping concern; concurrently he used his organisational skills to protect the island and create a major nature reserve. His ‘Jungle Garden’ is now one of the world’s most beautiful sanctuaries for the preservation and study of flora and fauna. Visit if you have the chance - but don’t forget to tour the factory! 
Enquiries: Tabasco, McIlhenny Company, ATTN: Customer Service, Avery Island, LA 70513/ 1-800-634-9599/ [email protected]/ www.tabasco.com/avery-island/our-home/