Please forgive the short intermission caused by a mission to Louisiana. I arrived safely back at Heathrow but unfortunately my suitcase did not, it’s enough to make you doubt the joys of air-travel. A couple of days later and according to the mighty computer the suitcase has landed, perhaps one day soon I will get my clothes back. To start our attack on the deep south we spent two days on Avery Island near Lafayette, which is home to Tabasco® pepper sauce and the McIlhenny dynasty – it’s an amazing place, ancient trees draped with Spanish Moss; a prosperous salt mine;  elegantly decorated wood-panelled mansions with fine Turkey carpets; huge sheds with towering stacks of oak barrels each filled with crushed peppers and salt – maturing for three years, an implausibly long time for a mass market product.

The recipe for Tabasco sauce is deceptively simple, it contains peppers, salt and vinegar, with two crucial added ingredients time and the skill. Every day another 700,000 bottles of sauce roll off the production line. What is more impressive is that this is a 200 year old family business. The saying “clogs to clogs in two generations” is often proved correct in Britain where each successive generation tends to squander the fortune accumulated by the one before. In contrast the McIlhenny clan have been making sauce for a dozen generations, and each has handed on the business in a stronger position. Some serious wealth has been accumulated and all from a single product, because despite the introduction of line extensions like the Habanero; Chipotle; and Pepper & Garlic sauces the original  little red bottle still rules the roost.

Each year a member of the family evaluates the 40 acres of peppers grown on Avery Island to select elite plants that will provide the seeds for the growers around the world – predominantly in Mexico and South America, but the McIlhenny’s are running trials as far away as South Africa. The peppers are picked by hand when each is perfectly ripe (an important bit of quality control) then they are mashed and packed into old, oak, whiskey barrels with salt and allowed to ferment before being sealed up for the long maturation process. After about three years it’s time to taste the mash, the top is knocked off the barrel and a teaspoonful extracted. The tasting etiquette is bizarre – you pop the chilli paste on your tongue and after about 5 seconds spit it out, by then (for all but the most hardened chilli-heads) the fire will have made the snot shoot out of your nose and your tear ducts go into overdrive. When the man with the iron tongue and the experience judges the paste to be ready it’s simply a matter of adding vinegar and stirring for 28 days before straining off the seeds and bottling the sauce. Tabasco sauce is a triumphant example of doing a simple thing very well, as is so often the case consistency is everything.

Charles Campion