Blues, haints and bayous: snippets from the Deep South: Tabasco tradition

We have lost count of the times we have eaten crawfish now, in Louisiana, and given that we are here just in time for these little mudbugs to be out in good numbers in the waters of the bayou we should have many more. Luckily, Louisiana harvests some 150 million pounds of crawfish a year, so our few pounds are not going to make much of a dent on the harvest. Hopefully. Though we are doing our best.

Tonight we ate at Crazy 'Bout Crawfish in Breaux Bridge, a colourful little venue with the usual collection of jars and cylinders and bottles of spices, sauce and other chilli condiments that Louisiana diners expect to have on hand to accompany their crawdaddies.

Each crawfish boiler seems to use a different selection of spices to flavour. The chilli level can vary dramatically. We like it hot. Tabasco hot. So, when we came to Avery Island, the home of McIlhenney and Co we crossed over a bridge, passed through the manned checkpoint, and parked, to explore the history of our favourite Tabasco sauce.

Tabasco sauce started, even before the Civil War, when Edmund McIlheney, a banker from up north, threw a handful of chilli seeds into his father-in-law's vegetable garden at their home on Avery Island. After the Civil War, with the country decimated, Edmund, without work and prospects bleak, moved to Avery with his wife and children, only to find his chilli plants fruiting profusely. A foodie, he set about making use of them: harvesting the chillis so as not to waste them, mixing them with this and that, bottling them for the cellar in old cologne bottles he found at hand.

The family loved his chilli sauce. Friends did, too. Over time he was urged to make something more of it. Grow more chilli plants. Fill more bottles. Add a label. This he did. Though Edmund died without ever realising he had created a giant which remains, to this day, one of the world's favourite hot sauces.

Descendants of Edmund's family still run the Tabasco factory on Avery Island. Always, it has been a family business: with the family virtually building a town close by to house their workers early in the twentieth century. They even built them a dance hall, where they loved to tango on nights off. So, the town came to be named Tango. Many of the worker families have been on the island for generations. One aged gentleman worker, who died not so long ago, was over 90 and had lived on the island for all but two years of his life.

Nowadays, the sauce factory and the historical museum on Avery island, is a show place, and makes a great tourist attraction. Some of the loveliest things survive from the earliest days. The bottles are still shaped like those old long-necked cologne bottles that Edmund loved and used. The logo is still a diamond, still distinctive. These days, though, there are many flavours and a selection of heat levels.

While the recipe remains really very simple. Just a mash of garden fresh chilli mixed with salt. Great deposits of salt exist in underground caverns here on Avery Island, and in such a watery world, there is no end to this salt.

The salted mash is stored in aged wooden bourbon casks topped with salt, and carbon dioxide, released from the chilli mix, bubbles up through the salt fermenting the mixture. After three years, vinegar is added. Then, the process only requires taste testing to finalise before it is bottled, ready for sale and distribution. The tradition lives on.