Do you know how long human beings have been enjoying hot sauce? Can you tell your peri-peri
from your pebre?
Hot sauce, as a broadly defined condiment, is enjoyed around the world today, but it
originated in the Americas. We’ll likely never know who the first people were to mash
up chili peppers into a liquid—there are candidates ranging from Bolivia to Mexico.
But we do know that people in Central and South America have been making hot sauces for thousands
of years. And it wasn’t always looked at as just a tasty condiment. Both the Aztecs
and the Maya valued hot peppers for their medicinal properties. Sore throats, stomachaches,
asthma, and colds were just some of the ailments chili products were thought to remedy. Today
we know that hot sauce isn’t a cure-all for most medical problems, but it can be used
as a painkiller. Chili peppers contain a number of capsaicinoids, chief among them capsaicin,
which mimic the sensation of heat when they touch our sensitive tissues. Once you endure
the initial burn, consuming capsaicin lets loose a rush of endorphins in your brain,
which in turn triggers an anti-inflammatory reaction throughout most of your body. This
is why medical professionals have experimented with using capsaicin as a pain reliever. It’s
also why the ancient Aztecs used drops of chili pepper sauce to relieve tooth pain.
As for the best way to relieve chili pepper pain, we’re still figuring that out.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd. Welcome to Food History. For millennia, humans have prized hot peppers
for the same mouth-scorching properties they evolved to keep hungry animals away. Which
brings up an interesting question, actually—why would a fruit evolve to avoid being eaten?
Isn’t that a big part of how they spread? The key here may be which animal is eating
the plant in question. When small mammals eat peppers, they tend to destroy the seeds
with their teeth and ruin the plant's chances for propagation. Birds, on the other hand,
don’t have teeth thankfully, so they can consume peppers and disperse their seeds intact.
Birds also have different taste receptors than mammals—capsaicin doesn’t deter them
the way it would a rat. Peppers may have evolved to discourage mammals but not birds. Along
the way, they seemed to have made themselves particularly appealing to people.
Hot sauce allows us to apply the taste of peppers to just about anything. When they
weren’t dabbing hot sauce on sore teeth, ancient Mesoamericans enjoyed it with corn
tortillas. This early version of the condiment was likely a simple paste consisting of ground
peppers, water, and possibly herbs. Though they didn’t have access to the onions or
garlic often used to flavor modern hot sauces, they refined the taste by cultivating new
pepper strains. By the time Spanish Conquistadors arrived in the Americas, many of the varieties
we know today—like anchos, jalapeños, and cayenne—were already part of the region’s
cuisine.
Peppers were one of the most exciting discoveries trans-Atlantic explorers brought back with
them to Europe. They were flavorful, cheap to grow, and adaptable to new climates. Spaniards
borrowed the Nahuatl word chilli from the Aztecs. The name pepper came from the plant’s
similarity to black pepper, which was the main source of spice in Europe’s pre-Columbian
food. Before the Columbian Exchange, there wasn’t anything quite like hot peppers growing
outside of the Americas.
Chilies completely transformed the cuisines of many places they reached. They arrived
in Asia via Portugese traders—probably in the early 1500s—and they were an instant
hit. Thanks to their affordability and appealing taste, chili peppers quickly replaced black
pepper as the primary spice throughout much of the continent.
Like the ancient Americans, Asian cooks began mashing their peppers with liquids and other
flavorings to make them into versatile sauces. These condiments were a little bit funkier
than what the Aztecs were dipping their tortillas into. Thailand became the birthplace of nam
phrik, which combines peppers with ingredients like fish sauce or fermented shrimp paste.
Out of Indonesia came hundreds of varieties of a crushed chili condiment called sambal.
In Korea, the fermented pepper paste gochujang is such a staple that there’s actually a
spiciness scale called the Gochujang Hot-taste Unit.
Africa was also introduced to hot peppers by way of the Portuguese, and many cultures
there embraced the affordable flavor bombs. One of the most prevalent hot sauces in Southern
Africa is piri piri, which is Ronga for “pepper pepper.” The condiment is made from African
Birdseye chilies—a pepper strain cultivated on the continent—and other ingredients like
lemon, vinegar, garlic, oil, and herbs. Angola, Namibia, and Mozambique are just a few of
the countries where it’s popular.
European colonization and global trade also transformed hot sauce in the pepper's birthplace.
Spicy condiments that are enjoyed in the Americas today include Chilean pebre—made from tomatoes,
onions, and chiles—and garlicky Mexican hot sauces—like the kind that brands like
Cholula and Tapatio sell.
According to data from Instacart, Cholula is the most popular hot sauce in America,
but it’s not the oldest product of its kind. Back in 1807, ads appeared in a Massachusetts
newspaper for a pepper sauce, which some sources have proclaimed the first commercial hot sauce
in the United States. This is a bit tricky to pin down, though. Food historian Charles
Perry doesn’t think this product would likely have been a hot sauce at all, but rather one
of several “pepper flavored vinegar ketchups for doctoring your food” that began to appear
around that time. The methods likely used to make the sauce wouldn’t have extracted
much, if any, of the capsaicin in the peppers, according to Perry, and New England diets
at the time were generally averse to spicy heat.
Perry speculates that rich Brits sailing to and from the Caribbean in the early 19th century
might have put some hot peppers in a bottle of sherry—a treatment that might have begun
as an anti-scurvy medicinal sauce. Soon enough, as Perry outlines it, it became a way to add
a bit of flavor to tasteless ship food, and people began developing a taste for the spicy
condiment.
Whatever the origin, before the 1800s were over, a number of bona fide American hot sauce
brands started popping up, including at least one name you’ve likely heard of. Tabasco
company founder Edmund McIlhenny began selling a fermented, vinegar-based pepper sauce in
bottles in the late 1860s. He named the sauce Tabasco after the type of chili it was made
from, which itself was named after its state of origin in Mexico. To get the sauce on the
tables of as many people as possible, McIlhenny sold it in bulk to restaurants and hotels
rather than directly to consumers. The ubiquity of the condiment in the hospitality industry
made it familiar to the public, and soon it became the dominant name in the hot sauce
market. The company was founded in Louisiana, but by the 1870s Tabasco had spread throughout
the U.S. and Europe.
The Tabasco company claims that McIlhenny invented Tabasco sauce, but the condiment’s
origins are up for debate. Two decades before McIlhenny bottled his first hot sauce, Colonel
Maunsel White came up with a similar concoction on his Louisiana plantation. He also grew
Tabasco chili peppers, and had the crops preserved by boiling them with vinegar. In 1850, the
New Orleans Daily Delta wrote that his sauce “possesses in a most concentrated and intense
form, all the qualities of the vegetable,” and that “a single drop of [the] sauce will
flavor a whole plate of soup or other food.”
Some believe that White should be credited with Tabasco sauce’s invention. It’s possible
that McIlhenny—a fellow Louisianan—even acquired the seeds he used to grow his peppers
from the colonel. The McIlhenny family counters that there’s little evidence for this assertion,
and points to substantial differences between the sauces—White apparently did not ferment
his product, for example. But regardless of who made the first true Tabasco sauce, it
was McIlhenny who turned the recipe into an international brand.
Sriracha is another massive name in the hot sauce world. The version most
Americans know with the green nozzle and the rooster on the label comes from David Tran,
the founder of Huy Fong Foods. Born in Vietnam, Tran first started selling his chili sauce
in 1975. At the end of the decade, he and his family fled their homeland onboard a Taiwanese
freighter ship named the Huey Fong, which roughly translates to “gathering prosperity.”
In the United States Tran eventually started selling his hot sauce again—this time to
immigrants from Southeast Asia looking for a taste of home. For his recipe, he drew inspiration
from a type of hot sauce from the town of Si Racha in Southeast Thailand. Tran combined
red jalapenos with vinegar, sugar, and garlic for a thicker, sweeter hot sauce than most
Americans were used to.
Huy Fong’s Sriracha sauce was a relatively quiet success for decades, but it really exploded
in the mid-2000s. In the 2010s its branding was slapped on everything from potato chips
to beer to cars. Sriracha mania may have passed its peak, but it still ranks No.3 on the list
of America’s favorite hot sauces, beating Tabasco.
Some adventurous eaters treat hot sauce consumption as a competition. There’s an entire scale
dedicated to measuring the heat of pepper-based products. Pharmacist Wilbur Scoville came
up with what would become Scoville Heat Units while attempting to make a heat-producing
ointment in 1912. SHUs originally measured how much a spicy food would need to be diluted
to neutralize its capsaicin content, but nowadays scientists generally use high-performance
liquid chromatography to identify where a given product falls on the scale. Tabasco
sauce clocks in at 2500 to 5000 SHUs, while Mad Dog 357 Plutonium No. 9—possibly the
world’s hottest hot sauce—reaches 9million Scoville Heat Units. I would surely have a
panic attack if I ate even a drop of that, so I’ll stick to my sriracha thank you very
much.
If you ever find yourself venturing into the high end of the Scoville Scale or are inexplicably
a guest on Hot Ones, dairy may be able to provide some relief. Casein, a
protein in milk, binds with capsaicin and carries it away from your sensitive taste
buds. Your other option is to build a tolerance for spicy foods. By repeatedly subjecting
your taste buds to capsaicin, you can desensitize your nerve endings. Experts recommend doing
this by gradually introducing spice to your diet until you're consuming it on a regular
basis. But past a certain heat threshold, the only thing that will heal your mouth,
just like a broken heart, is time.
Our next episode is about one of my favorite dishes: pad thai. If there’s anything specific
you want to know about this delicious peanut-y dish, drop a question in the comments. Thanks
for watching.