Hot Sauce Fun Fact - A Brief History of Hot Sauce
It's like a quick walk down hot sauce memory lane...
Hot sauces have been around since ancient times. It can be traced back to Aztec civilization as far back as 7000 BC - when someone discovered how good it is. Most likely, the first hot sauces were likely mixtures of water and peppers. And through time, humans started breeding pepper plants to get the most suitable traits of their peppers.
In the United States, the history of hot sauce can be traced around 200 years ago. So, here’s how it all went down.
Chili peppers are native to the Americas, and they spread throughout the continent through birds as most birds cannot taste the spiciness of chili peppers. When Christopher Columbus arrived in America, the chili peppers went global. And people from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean started developing their own spicy food and spicy sauce.
Around 1807, the first bottle of cayenne sauce appeared in Massachusetts 1807. Around the 1840s, the first seeds of tabasco pepper made their way in America from Mexico. And in 1849, the first recorded plantation of Tabasco chilis was in New Orleans owned by Colonel Maunsell White. He started bottling and selling hot sauces made of chili peppers.
Edward McIlhenny got seeds from White and started to grow peppers in Louisiana where he started his tabasco sauce and paved the way for the growth of hot sauce in America.