Chilli Pepper plants, we’re told, have been around for 100,000 years and are believed to be amongst the earliest cultivated plants. In February 2007 an article in the journal Science presented evidence that chile peppers were domesticated in South America at least by 6,000 years ago (The Bahamas to the Andes). So it’s not unreasonable to expect that throughout the ages conserves would have been made from these.
The first commercially bottled cayenne sauces appeared in Massachusetts in 1807. Few of these early sauces survive; a lot of this early history is gained from advertisements for sauces in newspapers.
Sometime between 1840 and 1860, J. McCollick & Company of New York City produced a Bird Pepper Sauce, most likely made with wild chiles called chiltepins, or bird peppers.
The first recorded crop of tabasco chiles was in 1849, grown by a prominent Louisiana banker and legislator, Colonel Maunsell White. Interestingly, 1849 is also the year that England's Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce was first imported into the United States via the port of New York.
By 1959 Colonel White is manufacturing hot sauce, the first using the "Tobasco" chile, and advertised bottles of it for sale.
The same year, 1859, Edmund McIlhenny obtains some seed from his friend Colonel White and starts farming chillies on his plantation on Avery Island, Louisiana. But by 1863 the Civil War forces him and his family out, they seek refuge in San Antonio, Texas. On returning home five years later he finds that the peppers plants are not only flourishing but also covered in tiny red peppers. He promptly manufactures a batch of sauce and sends out the first 350 bottles to wholesalers as samples, within weeks he has orders for thousands and Tabasco rapidly becomes the defining flavour of Louisiana. In 1870 McIlhenny obtains a patent on his Tabasco® Brand hot pepper sauce but interestingly the Tabasco brand was not trademarked until 1906.
In 1877, Chicago-based William Railton presented the first instance of an advertisement that positioned a hot sauce as an exotic variety with medicinal benefits.
A little later, between 1918 and 1928, a whole range of manufactures were turning their hand at creating hot sauces, some of the still well known brands like Crystal Hot Sauce, Bruce Foods Original Sauce and La Victoria Salsa Brava all started about this time. Then of course came the great Depression and nothing much happened until La Victoria introduced their innovative red taco sauce, green taco sauce and enchilada sauces in 1941, the first of their kind in the US. David Pace, now Pace Foods, launched his first picante sauce in 1947 working out of the back of their liquor store in San Antonio, Texas.
Of course hot sauces were being made at this time in other places such as the Caribbean but they tended to be family enterprises with recipes handed down from generation to generation. There are few records of full scale production, with the notable exception of the Pickapeppa Company of Jamaica that started manufacturing their still popular brand in 1921. Other brands well known today including Susie’s and Melinda’s also started in the ’60s.
Then in 1979 Dan Jardine began production of Jardine's commercial salsa in Austin Texas and promptly claimed Austin as the hot sauce capital of America. A title not unsurprisingly disputed, although Austin does have it’s own Hot Sauce Festival now.
The El Paso Chile Company, was started in 1980, by W. Park Kerr and Norma Kerr, and they came out with lots of new ideas in salsa such as adding cilantro and in another prickly pear cactus. The ‘80s was a fertile decade for salsa and sauces creators and saw the start of many of today’s big names; Panola, Franks, Montezuma.
Much of the hot sauce and salsa was being sold in specialist gourmet food shops but in 1988 Lisa Lammé opened Le Saucier in Boston, believed to be the first store dedicated to hot sauces. But the big event of 1988 was when Dave DeWitt organised the first National Fiery Foods Show in the town of El Paso, Texas. This show has become an annual mecca for fiery fo