Who Invented Hot Sauce? Why There Are Three Answers

Nobody invented hot sauce, at least not in the way one person invents a lightbulb. People in Mexico were grinding chilies into sauce roughly 6,000 years before anyone thought to put it in a bottle, and the question hides three different answers depending on what you mean by it. There’s the sauce itself, there’s the first written description of one, and there is the bottled product you buy at the store. Those three answers are separated by thousands of years and two continents.

Who invented hot sauce?

Here are the three, shortest first. The people of central-east Mexico were making chili sauces around 6,000 years ago, so the sauce has no inventor and no birthday. The Aztecs are the first people whose chili sauces we can read about, because a Spanish friar wrote them down in the 1500s. And bottled commercial hot sauce is a nineteenth-century American business, where the credit is still argued over.

The version of this story you usually hear skips the first 5,800 years and starts at Avery Island in 1868. That’s a bit like dating bread from the invention of sliced bread.

How far back do chili sauces go?

Chili peppers are among the oldest cultivated plants in the Americas. A 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pulled together four separate lines of evidence, including archaeology, climate modeling, genetics and reconstructed language, and put the domestication of Capsicum annuum in central-east Mexico, in the band running from southern Puebla and northern Oaxaca down to southern Veracruz.

The dates fall somewhere between 6,000 and 9,000 years ago. Speakers of Proto-Otomanguean had a word for chili pepper around 6,500 years ago, which tells you the plant mattered enough to name long before anyone wrote anything down.

Grinding those chilies with water and whatever else was to hand gives you a sauce. No recipe survives and none needs to, because that’s most of what a chili sauce is. What people were after was capsaicin, the compound that makes a chili burn, though it would be several thousand more years before anyone had a name for it or a way to measure it.

What did Aztec hot sauce look like?

The Aztecs did not invent chili sauce. They inherited a practice already thousands of years old and built it out, and they’re in this story because of an accident of documentation.

After the conquest, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún spent decades compiling what became the Florentine Codex, working with Nahua informants. He recorded what was for sale in the markets, and the chili section is long: hot green chilies, smoked chilies, water chilies, tree chilies, beetle chilies, sharp-pointed red chilies, strings of dried chilies, pre-cooked chilies.

He also described the sauces, which the Nahuatl called chilmolli. Two he names plainly: one made with red chili and tomatoes, one with yellow chili and tomatoes. They were ground on a stone molcajete, the same tool that may well be in your kitchen now. Those sauces are the ancestors of both modern salsa and, by a longer road, mole.

So the Aztecs are not the inventors. They’re the first chapter anyone bothered to write down, and even that was written by an outsider after their empire had fallen.

How did chili peppers reach the rest of the world?

Chilies left the Americas on Spanish and Portuguese ships. Diego Álvarez Chanca, the physician who sailed on Columbus’s second voyage in 1493 and was back in Spain by early 1494, is credited with bringing them into Spanish cooking.

Europe itself was slow about them. The Portuguese trade routes did the real distribution, carrying chilies to West Africa, India and Southeast Asia, where they met cooking that already had a taste for pungency from black pepper, ginger and mustard. Within a century the chili had become so thoroughly local in those places that people assumed it had always been there. India, Thailand, Korea and Sichuan all built their chili traditions on a plant that arrived after Columbus.

And that’s the odd shape of this history. The plant is American, the sauces are older than any written record of them, and most of the world’s great chili cuisines are younger than the year 1500. If you have eaten a vindaloo, a bowl of tom yum or a kimchi stew, you have eaten the result of that one plant moving.

What was the first bottled hot sauce?

The first bottled hot sauces we can document in the United States turned up in Massachusetts around 1807, sold as cayenne sauce. Almost no bottles survive, and what you can piece together comes from city directories and newspaper advertisements of the period. Chile authority Dave DeWitt describes them as probably homemade, close to the English bottled sauces of the day.

A better-documented one came later. J. McCollick & Company of New York produced a bird pepper sauce somewhere between 1840 and 1860, sold in a cathedral bottle nearly eleven inches tall. Bird peppers means chiltepins, the wild chili you can still find growing across northern Mexico and the American southwest.

So the bottle predates Tabasco by sixty years. Tabasco didn’t invent the category. It made the category famous.

Did Edmund McIlhenny really invent Tabasco?

Probably, though the real version is messier than the label suggests, and the messy part has a name: Colonel Maunsel White, a New Orleans plantation owner and politician.

White grew a recorded crop of tabasco chilies at his Deer Range Plantation in 1849, documented in a letter published in the New Orleans Daily Delta. By 1859 he was advertising bottles of his pepper sauce for sale. That’s nearly a decade before Edmund McIlhenny bottled anything.

The link between the two men is where it gets contested. Historian Jean Andrews pointed to testimony from a 1922 US Circuit Court case saying White handed pods and his recipe to his friend McIlhenny at Deer Range before White died in 1862. Jeffrey Rothfeder’s book on the company, McIlhenny’s Gold, lays out more of the case that White got there first. The McIlhenny company tells it differently, crediting seeds brought north by a traveler returning from Mexico.

What nobody disputes is what McIlhenny did next. He grew his first commercial pepper crop on Avery Island in 1868, filled 350 used cologne bottles as samples, sold the first of them in 1869, patented the sauce in 1870 and had a London office by 1872. Whoever bottled first, that sequence turned a regional condiment into a global one, and Tabasco sauce is still made on the same island, which you can visit.

Which early hot sauce brands are still around?

Tabasco’s success pulled a whole industry along behind it, and a surprising number of those early brands are still on your supermarket shelf.

Frank’s RedHot dates to 1920 in Louisiana, and later became the sauce in the original Buffalo wing. Pickapeppa started in Jamaica in 1921, sweet and tamarind-heavy and unlike anything American. Crystal followed in New Orleans in 1923, and still outsells Tabasco in parts of Louisiana. Louisiana Hot Sauce arrived in 1928 and Texas Pete in 1929, the latter barely spicy if you have eaten much else, and named by a company that wanted a cowboy on the label.

What links them is format rather than flavor: aged cayenne mash, vinegar, salt. That Louisiana formula became the default American idea of what hot sauce is, which is why a bottle of something similar tastes like the baseline to you even now.

Where does sriracha fit in?

Outside that line entirely. Sriracha is the other big American hot sauce story and it starts in 1980, when David Tran founded Huy Fong Foods on Spring Street in Los Angeles Chinatown.

Tran had left Vietnam by cargo boat and reached Boston in the spring of 1979. He named the company after the Huey Fong, the freighter that carried him out. The rooster on the bottle you know is there because he was born in the Year of the Rooster. In his first month he sold $2,300 of sauce out of a van to local restaurants.

The sauce takes its name from Si Racha in Thailand, where the style originated, though Tran’s version is its own thing: thicker, sweeter and more garlic-forward than Thai sriracha. It has no vinegar-and-cayenne heritage behind it at all, which is part of why famous Sriracha sauce landed as something genuinely new in an American supermarket. Huy Fong makes sambal oelek as well.

The bottom line

So the answer depends on the question. If you mean the sauce, nobody invented it, and cooks in central-east Mexico were making it around 6,000 years ago. If you mean the first one anybody described, that’s the Aztec chilmolli in Sahagún’s codex. If you mean the bottle on your table, that’s nineteenth-century Louisiana, with Maunsel White and Edmund McIlhenny still sharing the credit uneasily.

The only answer that’s plainly wrong is the one naming a single inventor. Hot sauce is older than writing, and it belongs to more people than you could ever name.

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