HEAT SEEKER
IN LOUISIANA’S CAJUN COUNTRY, ESQUIRE’S TOM PARKER BOWLES MAKES A PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOME OF TABASCO, THE SPICY RED SAUCE THAT CHANGED HIS LIFE
one drop. that’s all it took, to lead me down that red road to ruin, to start an addiction so fierce and fiery that my life can be reduced to two acronyms: BT and AT. Before Tabasco. And After Tabasco. Monochrome versus Technicolor. Cliff Richard eclipsed by Iggy Pop. Boycott beaten by Botham.
Not that my home diet was dreary. But the nearest I’d ever got to spice was a mouthful of that vile Coronation chicken. If that was exotic, then count me out. Tabasco was different. It lived on the drinks table, for a start, among the heavy decanters of whisky and vodka, the soda syphons, sticky bottles of Martini Rosso and home-made damson gin. Not the cupboard. Never the cupboard. But with its neat red top, slim shoulders, the gleaming green foil that wrapped around its neck, and that iconic diamond label, it offered not just a taste of America. But danger too. This sauce bit back.
The liquid at home was no longer red, rather a muddy brown. The same bottle had lingered on that table for what seemed like years. Because a couple of jigs in a Bloody Mary, a couple of times per week, was about as much action as it got, used for subtle piquancy, not base power. But my sister and me were obsessed. We’d start with that drop: rich, sharp and thrillingly dangerous. Vinegar first, a jolt to the mouth, followed by a hint of sweetness, and complexity, then a slow, insidious chilli burn that rolled across our virgin palates in great flaming waves. We’d shriek and giggle and gape, spangled on natural endorphins, our tongues engorged, our taste buds priapic with chilli lust. This was no mere sauce, rather a thrill, a kick, a dabble on the dark side.
And we’d dare each other to take more, until our cheeks flushed scarlet, our eyes filled with tears and we were convinced that steam blew out of our ears. Like Wile E Coyote, or that damned cat, Tom. If any guest was fool enough to leave their drink unattended, we’d slip in a slug, Medici-style. And sit back to await the show. But one day we took it too far. Emptied a whole bottle into a friend’s Virgin Mary. He collapsed, crying, grasping his belly, as if struck by a poisoned dart. Parents came running in, questions were asked, blame apportioned. They were not disappointed. They were angry. And that was the end of the games.
But it was just the start of my addiction. First Tabasco, the gateway drug. Then a brief flirtation with Madras, quickly escalating to vindaloo. Before I knew it, I was deep in Caribbean hot sauce, Chinese chilli oil and Thai nam prik. With an expensive Chile Pepper magazine habit too. I reached rock bottom with a brief but markedly painful brush with “extract sauces”, the crystal meth of the chilli world. If Tabasco sits around 5000 on the Scoville scale (a system of measuring a chilli’s heat), then the likes of Blair’s 3AM Reserve comes in at a whopping two million. This stuff could take down King Kong.
it all, though, started with that first drop. And it’s another of those drops that currently sits upon the soft, labial folds of a Gulf Coast oyster in Bourbon House, New Orleans. You only need one drop, to cosset and flatter that fleeting marine sweetness. Any more, and the briny elegance of the oyster is all but lost. But an oyster without Tabasco is like a belle without a beau. It just ain’t right.
I’m with my friend Chris, who also happens to be a photographer, here in New Orleans, a sybaritic stop-off en route to the south of Louisiana, and Avery Island, the birthplace and home of Tabasco. I’ve made the pilgrimage before, twice to be precise. Of course I have. It’s my secular Lourdes, a chilli spiked Camino de Santiago. While others bow to higher powers, I put my faith in the sauce. But first, New Orleans — the Big Easy, Crescent City — the place where clichés never sleep.
Voodoo and vampires, beignets and beads, jazz, juju and muffuletta sandwiches as big as a wheel. The muddy Mississippi and those eerily magnificent cities of the dead; clanging streetcars, the intricately wrought-iron balconies of the Garden District, the plaintive cry of the freight trains passing through. And the corporate-sponsored hedonism of Bourbon Street. In short, a Creole-flavoured Xanadu, a place where America comes to play. Yet it’s also a city with the nation’s highest poverty rate, a place still wearing the deep scars of Hurricane Katrina. Away from bright lights and drivethrough daiquiri stands, the strip joints, voodoo shops and 24-hour bars, New Orleans has a darker side. It’s a place where malnutrition, corruption, crime and desperation are rife. And beneath the bonhomie, there’s a palpable edge. It’s not a city where you stumble into the wrong neighbourhood, half-cut and late at night.
Everything is jumbled up here in one vast, ever-whirring, Creole blender: races, religions, cultures, accents and food. Not so much melting pot as seething, bubbling cauldron; a great and glorious gumbo where too much is not enough. Dining here can be hard work. It requires tenacity, perseverance and grit. Most things are deep fried (oysters, shrimp, catfish, crawfish or chicken), or lavished with so much butter and cream that even Auguste Escoffier would baulk.
This is, though, one of the world’s great eating cities. Whatever your desire — peer
If the roux is the heart of Creole and Cajun cooking, onion, pepper and celery its soul, then Tabasco is its lifeblood
less Vietnamese, serious steak, spanking fresh seafood, new wave, old school, haute and low down — you’ll find it here. We spend a day and night doing what tourists do: queueing for coffee with chicory, and fluffy beignets buried in sugar at Café Du Monde, watching the touts and panhandlers and horse-drawn carts plying their trade. We sway happily among the crowds, then, as it’s just past 10am, wander to the corner of Bourbon and Bienville Streets, to the Old Absinthe House. I always seem to end up here. Or start off. It opens at 8am but I’m fairly sure it never closes. Sitting at the bar, among the tourists and locals, we sip absinthe frappés, icy cold and lethally strong. Then totter off for lunch at Cochon, a sort of St John with a N’awlins accent. And eat gumbo, intense, thick and blacker than Baron Samedi’s soul. It’s all about that roux, the combination of fat and flour, both thickener and flavour enhancer. There’s a touch of the Cajun here, too, like boudin, a spiced, rice-stuffed pork sausage. The food of rural Louisiana, Creole’s spicier, more robust country cousin.
The next morning, the sky is a drab grey as we climb into the car and head west, taking
Highway 90 into the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest river swamp in the United States, covering nearly a million acres, towards Avery Island and into the heart of Cajun country, where vowels are thick as gumbo, names are French, and everything’s fit for the pot. One of my favourite local cookbooks is by Marcelle Bienvenu and called Who’s Your Mama, are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux? It seems to say it all.
Originally known as Acadians, they were French settlers, fishermen and farmers, forced from their Novia Scotia homeland of Acadia by the British in the mid-18th century, and eventually settling in Southern Louisiana. The soil was fertile, the rivers, swamps and sea crawling with crawfish, turtles, frogs, crabs and shrimp. If the roux is the heart of Creole and Cajun cooking, and the holy trinity (onion, peppers and celery) its soul, then Tabasco is its lifeblood.
We cross old iron bridges, speckled with rust, and catch glimmers of the bayou’s dull green and flashes of white from startled egrets. Trees are exotically named: persimmon, cypress, pecan. But it’s hardly the South of popular imagination. There’s a starkness, a tired, peeling, sun-faded ennui, as we pass trailer parks and motor homes, boat shops, clapboard houses, strip malls, rain ditches, cane fields and endless Smoke’ n Go discount tobacco shops. Advertisements tout for business — grinning, white-teethed lawyers offering compensation for oil rig injuries. Since the downturn in the oil business, times are even harder. Signs supporting local politicians are entirely Republican red.
We arrive in New Iberia, a place I’ve never been but feel I know already. It’s the home of Dave Robicheaux, the grizzled, good-hearted, alcoholic Cajun cop in James Lee Burke’s lyrical crime novels, with a pretty Main Street, grand old houses, art deco Evangeline Theatre and handsome parish courthouse. We stop as we cross Bayou Teche, the waterway which meanders slowly and brownly through town. The Bon Creole Lunch Counter, another of Robicheaux’s haunts, is a single-storey brick building. Inside, past the order bar, is the main room, the walls covered with antlers, elk and bison heads, even a whole blue marlin.
Here we meet John Simmons, the Senior Manager of Agriculture for the privately owned
Tabasco brand, responsible for overseeing the growth of every single pepper used to make Tabasco sauce, and a sixth generation member of the McIlhenny family. He’s warm and broadshouldered, with a gleaming bald head and laconic smile. Although trained as a lawyer, he rejoined the family business a few years back, having spent college summers hoeing the pepper fields and rehooping and repairing barrels.
“Tabasco is so simple, just three ingredients,” he says. “Vinegar, red pepper and salt. We start with pepper cultivation, grown in Central and South America on small farms, as well as in
Zimbabwe and South Africa, from our own seed stock. All picked by hand. The peppers are mashed with salt, sent back here, aged for three years in charred American oak bourbon barrels. We add vinegar, mix it up for a few weeks, remove the seeds and pulp, and bottle it up. That’s it.”
Avery Island was originally a sugar plantation called Petite Anse Island, owned by Daniel Dudley Avery, whose daughter, Mary Eliza married, in 1859, Edmund McIlhenny, a rich, successful New Orleans banker. He was also Avery’s best friend (the original proposal was rebuffed), and a man with a taste for peppers. One legend goes that he bumped into a veteran of the Mexican-American War (1846– ’48), who gave him a fistful of chillies from the Mexican state of Tabasco. He planted these on Avery Island, and, once the American Civil War (1861—’65) was over (the McIlhennys fled to Texas before the Union forces got hold of them), returned to find them flourishing. And so in 1868, he made his sauce, decanting it into small, used cologne bottles. And an empire was born.
Other versions claim Edmund McIlhenny was given the peppers by a New Orleans planter, or that he found a single pepper plant growing when he returned to the island. Whatever the truth, 1868 saw the first commercial pepper crop. And in 1869, 658 bottles of pepper sauce were produced. The sauce was not fermented for three years in wooden barrels, rather for 60 days in jars. By 1889, 42,472 bottles were manufactured and distributed across the whole of the United States. And beyond.
“Jaaahhnnn,” cries a voice from the hatch. “Gumbo and po’ boys for Jaaahhnnn.” Simmons gets up to collect our lunch.
“It’s a family business in many different ways,” he says, dousing his chicken and sausage gumbo with Tabasco, then pouring it over rice and potato salad. “But we ship to more than 195 countries and territories. That’s more than McDonald’s.”
There’s a murky sharpness to the gumbo, and a soothing depth. We talk about Louisiana’s ever-shrinking coastline, where the equivalent of a football field is lost to the sea every hourand-a-half. The thousands of miles of levees and flood walls built to manage the Mississippi may keep Southern Louisiana safe from the floods but this comes at huge cost to the coast. Add in the rising sea level and storm surges, and the future is decidedly uncertain. “We have kids come in the summer to plant grass. That helps.”
We move onto the po’ boys, a sandwich of utter magnificence: soft, sweetish baguette-style bread with a crisp crust, stuffed with artfully fried shrimp. And mayonnaise, tomato and lettuce. And lashings of Tabasco. Of course. If it’s ubiquitous in New Orleans, it’s endemic here.
the journey to avery island is short, just a few miles southwest of New Iberia. We pass an ivy-clad visitor centre, red brick houses, storage barns for the barrels, and the factory and bot
tling plant. There’s a verdant feel to the place, built on a salt dome, with a working salt mine. And 170 acres of semi-tropical Jungle Gardens, taking in the Bird City refuge, where thousands of snowy egrets, with their Jimmy Savile hairdos and long, black beaks, nest. (It was set up by Edward “Ned” Avery, son of the founder, Edmund McIlhenny, in 1895; the popularity of the birds’ plumes saw them hunted almost to extinction.) A Buddha statue, given to Ned by friends, sits benignly in a Japanese pagoda, among an incongruous bamboo forest. The ubiquitous Southern live oaks are draped in Spanish moss, with a mournful, haunting allure. A place of Confederate ghosts, and Southern Gothic charm, at once lushly bucolic and mildly unsettling. ’Gators float by with lazy menace, occasionally crawling up onto the banks.
“Every single bottle produced in the world comes from here,” Simmons says, as we enter the storage warehouse where 70,000 barrels, three-and-a-half years’ worth of stock, are gently fermenting and ageing, piled five-high, their tops sealed with salt, as far as the eye can see. It reminds me of that last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark is stored away among the millions of other government boxes. The smell is musty, acrid and vinegary, creeping up one’s nose. We taste the unaged fresh pepper mash; pillar-box red, sharp, strong and aggressive. Three years later, and the crimson has changed to rust, the flavours softer, more complex, with hints of tobacco, raisin and oak. The key is to produce an utterly consistent product, no mean feat when blending chillies from many different farms.
We inspect vast steel vats where the aged mash is mixed with the vinegar for 30 days. The odour is pungent in here, hitting the back of the throat like pepper spray. And pass through the laboratories, where the sauces and mashes are constantly tested, for acidity, and pH, and viscosity and moisture. Every batch is tested six times and every bottle must taste the same. Then into the cacophonous din of the bottling plant, where I stare, entranced, at the hypnotic machines, filling bottles, screwing on caps, sticking on labels and packing into boxes, ready for delivery across the globe. The process is both blissfully simple and mind-bogglingly technical, too.
Later, we drive with Simmons to Abbeville, a small town a few miles away, to Richard’s (pronounced Reechard’s) Seafood Patio. It’s little more than a shack, with concrete floors and corrugated iron walls and red and white chequered plastic tablecloths. We’re here to eat crayfish, or crawfish, boiled up in seasoned water and served by the kilo. The season runs from the end of February to May. And the boil is more religion than meal. All around us, piles of crawfish are being demolished in respectful silence, diners’ heads bowed deep in worship.
“Everyone has a view on how to do the crawfish boil,” says Simmons, as we chew on deep-fried ’gator. “Some boil with seasoning. Some boil in salt, then finish with the seasoning powder. [And] their way is, of course, the only true way.
“Some people won’t eat crawfish in a restaurant,” he says between bites. “Part of the fun is drinking beer.” It’s as much social gathering as it is crustacean feast. The crawfish arrive, a violent red, boiled along with corn and potatoes and mushrooms. You twist the body to remove the head, unwrapping the hard carapace to get to the luscious meat. Then use your pinky to dig out the sweetly fetid head goo. By the end, my lips are tingling, my hands filthy, a broad smile plastered fat across my face.
The best crawfish is rarely found in the poshest places. We try more in The Boiling Point, off the main road to Lafayette, a great aircraft hangar of a building. “Bud and Boiling” says the neon sign. “Pull your pants up,” cries another. And, “I’ve never met a crawfish I didn’t like.” Before that, we’d dropped in at Legnon’s Boucherie in New Iberia for worldclass boudin sausage, made fresh every day and sold hot from the steamer.
“Rice, Boston butt, onions, garlic, cayenne pepper. That’s it,” says Ted Legnon, with short, neat, white hair and a red apron. “We sell 1,200 pounds of hot sausage per day. I’ve been doing this for 38 years.” It shows. The first bite sees the snap of the casing then the sweetness of pork, and the kick of pepper, and the soft squidge of rice. It’s up there with the best sausages I’ve ever eaten. Damned good hot crackling too.
It’s on the way back to New Orleans that we spot a sign for Dago’s II Crawfish Shack. “Boiling today,” it reads. So we drive a few more miles to a remote gas station, where the food counter, little more than a shelf with three chairs, is wedged behind the till. There’s one other diner, Harvey Blanchard Jr, a sugar cane farmer from up the road. These are the best so far, lustily spicy, yet the flesh sweet and succulent. I eat two kilos. My last crawfish feast.
“If they were any better, the Good Lord would keep them for Himself,” says Blanchard with a grin. He sees me dousing the crawfish with my favourite hot sauce, and nods approvingly.
“Tabasco,” he says, his face suddenly serious. “A little piece of Louisiana that conquered the world.”
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considering the sandwich was “invented” circa 1762, a quarter-millennium ago, it took a long time for someone to realise that putting fists of ham hock, a fried egg, shoestring fries, piccalilli and malt vinegar mayo in the middle of some focaccia would be off-the-charts mind-blowing. It was, in fact, late 2014 and the visionary was Max Halley, the 37-year-old proprietor of Max’s
Sandwich Shop in Crouch Hill, north London, and author of Max’s Sandwich Book. The third wave sandwich was born.
As befits his creations, Halley has maverick tendencies. He swears he’s worn a black polo shirt every day for 12 years (no particular brand: “Fruit of the Loom?”) He has a visceral hatred of cheese. He has a quite literally unhealthy obsession with throwing strange ingredients in a deep-fat fryer. But when he came up with “Ham, Egg ’N’ Chips” he knew he was onto something: “I thought, ‘Holy God, if I just make sure there’s hot, cold, sweet, sour, crunchy and soft in my sandwiches, that’s the secret of deliciousness’. It’s such a good little mantra.”
Hot, cold, sweet, sour, crunchy, soft: the
*So, wave one was John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, asking for some beef between two slices of toasted bread — perhaps late at night playing cards, or maybe just working after hours — and eating it with his hands. The second wave came in 1980 when M&S started hawking sad little cartons of egg and cress, or a few years later when Pret a Manger went modestly experimental with its crayfish and rocket.
manifesto of the sandwich’s third wave. And it’s taken a few years to percolate through, but deranged, high-concept sandwiches are definitely a thing now, at least in London. One of the most ’grammed dishes of recent times is the Iberian Katsu Sando, made by Ana Gonçalves and Zijun Meng at Tōu in the Arcade Food Theatre (its real name) in Centre Point. The sando is pleasingly palindromic in appearance: a slice of toasted brioche, a slab of pork neck that’s been breaded in panko shards and deepfried, then more brioche. It sells for £14.
Over at Bodega Rita’s in King’s Cross, Gabriel Pryce and Missy Flynn have reimagined the Vietnamese staple Bánh Mì in such an ingenious, umami-dense way — the trad grilled meat is replaced with roast oyster mushrooms, peanut butter and red chilli — that you’d bet the house it couldn’t be vegan. The Evening Standard called it “a moistmaker”, a nod to Ross Geller’s gravy-soaked turkey sandwich on Friends.
Where the third wave differs from previous incarnations though, is the rise in specialist offerings as more and more chefs deign the snack
worthy of their consideration. At Pidgin in east London, James Ramsden and Sam Herlihy shoot for Michelin stars, but at Sons + Daughters, their new takeaway also in King’s Cross, they believe they can be equally subversive between two slices of bread. They do an egg and cress but with miso mayonnaise and truffle crisps. The snap and tang in their prawn sandwich is from crushed prawn crackers and jalapeño vinaigrette.
“There’s something comforting about the sandwich,” says Ramsden. “Given everything going on in the world, potentially that’s why the sandwich is having its moment. There’s nothing intimidating,” a pause, a smile, “but we’re trying to change that.”
All these pioneers see no reason why a sandwich shouldn’t be dinner. They’d all say the only limit on your home creations is imagination. But what they really agree on is there’s no way to eat their filling-stuffed behemoths with any modicum of dignity. Don’t take a date to a third wave sandwich shop. “Yep, nobody wants to see gravy mayonnaise dribbling down their date’s chin,” agrees Halley. “Not until you’ve gone to each other’s houses for Christmas anyway.”
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