Hot pepper sauce fans seem to think of the stuff as an ancient, ageless culinary classic. Younger gens think Hot Sauce was invented in the 1980s. Still others will point to Edmund McIlhenny’s 1868 Tabasco Patent as ‘the beginning’. In some ways, they’re all correct!
The ancient and venerable connection between Hot Pepper Sauce and Latin America turns out to be just as genuine as most of us have assumed it to be, all along. But that just one of a number of parallel and overlapping developments that marked the coming of the Hot Sauce Age to America.
Parallel evolution
Those fans who didn’t ascribe the origin of hot pepper sauces to Central and South America may have thought it was ‘invented’ in Asia, where curry, Szechuan and Hunan cuisines have glorified ‘hot and spicy’ for hundreds of years. But that was a totally separate family line to the one that evolved into the hot pepper culture we celebrate in North America today.
According to the hot pepper experts at the Pepper Palace in Sevierville, Tennessee, we can thank the ancient Aztecs for the creation of the first ‘American’ hot pepper sauces and pastes more than 7,000 years ago. A number of varieties of spicy peppers have ‘always’ grown natively in the southern tem-perate zones of western North and South America, especially on the Pacific side of the mountain ranges that run from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego.
But let’s not forget the corresponding climate zones of Africa, Southern India and Southeast Asia. Hot peppers are truly a global phenomenon…
What’s the attraction?
The Aztecs were not the only civilization to believe that hot peppers were next to Godliness. The or-iginal idea was that such exotic and bold flavours were expressions here on Earth of the powers of the gods. And had been shared by them as examples of what to offer the higher and mightier who lived among the clouds atop the 8,900 km (5,530 mi.) Andes Cordillera which extends south to North through extend from South to North through seven South American countries including: Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.
At various early times, chilis were also used as curren-cy and for medicinal purposes throughout their range. There even exist wall paintings of Aztec parents pun-ishing their naughty kids by making them inhale the smoke from roasting chilis. (See photo of docu-ment, left.)…
The Mayans came after the Aztecs, and extended the pre-Colombian range of ancient indigenous civil-izations as far north as what’s now central Mexico. They famously added cocoa and chocolate to the menu of sacrificial temple foods that began with hot peppers.
‘Went viral’ in the 1500s
You might say hot pepper flavourings went viral in the 1500s, when Colombian-age explorers and Conquistadors brought them back to Europe from the Americas – along with potatoes and tomatoes. But that was, generally speaking, around the same time as Marco Polo and his contemporaries were venturing east from Europe to explore Asia. And the Chinese were starting to push the Silk Road west to create land trade routes to Eastern Europe and Africa.
So, it’s hard to say whether East or West had the earliest or even dominant influence on the Euro-pean spice cultures that have followed…
Back in the USA…
Some notable landmarks on the North American Hot Pepper timeline succeeded each other in fairly short order during the 19th Century:
1807: The first known advertisement for a commercial brand of hot sauce was published in a Massa-chusetts newspaper.
1848: US soldiers returning home in 1848 after the Mexican-American War brought hot pepper seeds back with them. And when the folks at home got a taste, there was, as the historians say, no turning back.
1850: The aforementioned Ed MchIlhenny was granted the first American Patent for hot pepper sauce. By 1868, Ed had trademarked his ‘Tabasco’ brand, and it had became an iconic hit in the US. Today, many folks not intimately acquainted with Hot Sauce Culture equate the name ‘Tabasco’ with hot sauce in the same way that most Americans equate ‘Kleenex’ brand with facial tissue. It’s a genuine ‘household name’.
Contemporary Hot Sauce culture
1985: Most sauce historians generally agree that ‘mo-dern’ Hot Sauce culture got its start in the kid 1980s. That’s roughly when interest in things southwestern began to spread across the continent. And Tex-Mex fast food chains really started to hit their stride.
The Millennium: With a growing interest in international foods and the availability of an unprece-dented selection of international ingredients came what has today has become an abiding, bountiful, and amazingly diverse global Hot Sauce subculture.
My take
Hot Peppers have been purpose-bred to provide an almost unimaginable range of heats and flavour profiles… From light, zippy, piquant, ‘fruity’ and even floral, to a whole range of ‘volcanic’ and even ‘you-might-actually-die-from-eating this’ variants perhaps better-suited to bear spray.
Fortunately, the pendulum is swinging back toward a more subtle, stable middle ground from the ridiculously hot extreme it reached in the mid-late 20-teens. And that’s a good thing.
It’s my avowed hope that hot pepper sauces, pastes, seasonings and just about every other prepar-ation style you can think of are with us to stay. In a sensible range of forms and formats that offer a version everyone can appreciate and enjoy…
~ Maggie J.