Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 - (Page 33)

opposite page, top: In the late 19th-century, workers at Avery Island sealed crocks containing pepper mash and salt for the aging process required to produce Tabasco. opposite page, below: Edmund McIlhenny’s handwritten recipe for Tabasco sauce. right: Pepper fields blanket Avery Island. choice may have been influenced by historically strong commercial ties between the port of New Orleans and the Tabasco region of Mexico. Prior to the coming of the railroad in the 1880s, Edmund shipped his finished sauce by horse and wagon to nearby New Iberia. From there steamboats carried it down Bayou Teche, across several coastal bays, against the current up Bayou Plaquemines, and down the Mississippi to New Orleans. In the city, grocers introduced his sauce to local Reconstruction-era consumers. The meandering trip to New Orleans resulted in many broken bottles and much spoiled sauce. Edmund solved these problems by using sturdier bottles, sanitizing corks in alcohol, and sealing bottle tops in green wax. (Modern screwtop Tabasco bottles sport a green neckband in homage to the days when Edmund topped off his bottles with green wax.) In 1870 Edmund entered into a MARKETED NATIONWIDE business relationship with an Henshaw soon negotiated an unsung hero of early Tabasco amazingly successful agreement history: John C. Henshaw, a abasco is with E.C. Hazard and former Union officer and a word of Mexican-Indian Company of New York City, distant Avery relative one of the largest food who resided in origin supposedly meaning “land manufacturers and disNew York City. where the soil is humid” or “place of tributors in 19thEdmund wanted century America. to sell Tabasco coral or oyster shell.” There are Hazard quickly sauce outside historically strong trade ties between became Edmund’s South Louisiana largest customer, ordering and, noting Henshaw’s New Orleans and the Mexican in 1872, for example, more splendid reputation province. than 10,500 bottles of Tabasco among the Averys as an sauce, which it supplied at wholeentrepreneur, he asked sale to grocers in the Northeast and Henshaw to serve as his first beyond. As a result, Tabasco sauce Tabasco salesman. Edmund chose advanced dramatically toward becoming a wisely, because Henshaw, in modern nationally recognized product. parlance, was “a real go-getter” who In addition, Henshaw proposed that energetically set about introducing Tabasco Edmund obtain his bottles, stoppers, labels, crates, sauce in the major cities of the Northeast. and other supplies from highly competitive manuEdmund so admired Henshaw’s dynamism that facturers in the industrial Northeast. He correctly he shortly appointed him the sole Tabasco agent for asserted that these manufacturers could provide such Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, items more cheaply than less efficient firms in New Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia. T Fall 2005/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 33

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 Contents Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Louisiana State Museum After Katrina and Rita Tabasco: Edmund McIlhenny and the Birth of a Louisiana Pepper Sauce Historic New Orleans Collection Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans’ Coffee Connection No Man’s Land Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism Bookstand (Book Review by Thomas Uskali) Sound Advice (Music Review by Ben Sandmel) Forum (Commentary by Roy Blount, Jr. )

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005

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