Tabasco sauce is a Louisiana product with international reach. A short story in The New York Times focuses on its origins, revealing that the spicy sauce, produced in Avery Island, has had customers outside south Louisiana since its early days.
The story recounts how founder Tabasco Edmund McIlhenny, "a New Orleans banker and bon vivant," retreated to his wife's family's sugar plantation on Avery Island (then called Petite Anse Island) following the Civil War. His technique for making sauce from the peppers in the garden was, according to the Times, "a laborious one that involved crushing the peppers with a potato masher and mixing them with rock salt from the island's own salt mines, then aging the mash twice, adding vinegar in between."
The sauce's distribution spread quickly; it was found throughout the Northeast by the early 1870s. Soon, "comic tales of people mistaking Tabasco for ketchup" started appearing in the New York Times. One quoted in the story, from 1901, reads like an outtake from Melville: "B'jocks, though, I was thunderin' nigh dead when I fust et that ketchup," it reads. "Dreadful powerful stuff that is to put on victuals."
And, South Louisiana cooks often specifically list Tabasco as the hot sauce to use in a recipe. Check out this recipe for Louisiana Tabasco Jelly, originally published in "Tony Chachere's Micro-wave Cajun Country Cookbook." For more dishes spiced with Tabasco, visit the Tabasco website.