McIlhenny's Gold: How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco Empire

Never again will I be able to pick up that little bottle of Tabasco sauce and sprinkle a few drops on whatever I am eating, something I have done several times a week for a few decades now , without thinking of the amazing set of circumstances that came together to put that distinctive little bottle on my table. Sometimes the little diamond-shaped label on the front of the bottle, the one that still mentions Avery Island as being its home, would catch my eye and make me wonder how such a unique product could have been born in such an isolated place and how it managed to survive long enough to become a product recognized around the world. Jeffrey Rothfeder’s new book, McIlhenny’s Gold, provides the answers to all of my questions.

Rothfeder tells the story of a remarkable family, one that literally rose from the ashes of the Civil War to create a hugely successful business based on the sale of a single food product, a business that is still well known some 140 years later. In his research of the McIlhenny family, Rothfeder found that much of what has come to be accepted about the family’s history and the origin of Tabasco sauce is simply untrue. So many myths surround the family and its product, in fact, that even family members have found it difficult to separate fact from fiction.

When Edmund McIlhenny, fifty years old at the end of the Civil War, and prior to the war a successful New Orleans banker, returned to Louisiana in 1865 he found that the Avery family he had married into was largely destitute. The family’s rich sugar cane plantation was no more and the only thing of value still in family hands was Petit Anse, the little island that was later to be renamed Avery Island.

Edmund McIlhenny was a businessman, not a farmer. As a pre-war banker, he learned to market himself personally to such a degree that he became the best known and most sought after financial man in New Orleans. His marketing skills, and his willingness to bend the truth when it made for a better story, have made it difficult to determine exactly when he became aware of the chili pepper from Mexico’s Tabasco region and how he decided to make hot sauce the new family business. What is clear, however, is that he made the right decision and that he created a business that has served his family well for four generations.

The McIlhenny product has been a high quality one from the beginning. The three-year chili paste aging process and the inability to use mechanized pickers to gather the delicate chili peppers requires that manufacturing costs, especially labor costs, be controlled as tightly as possible. That concern led to the near recreation of the plantation system on Avery Island, a company town so complete with free shelter, medical care, schools and churches that white employees had little reason to ever leave little Avery Island. McIlhenny Co. workers, almost guaranteed a job for life, became extremely loyal to the company that provided them with everything they needed. This system lasted until a few years ago and was key to the company’s success.

McIlhenny Co., still based on the sale of a single product, has become a $250 million per year business but it is facing difficult times because one of its previous strengths has turned into its greatest weakness. The company has always been run by a member of the McIlhenny family and for three generations the family was blessed to have a family member ready to take on the job and to do it adequately, if not always completely well. But, as almost always happens in a closely held family business, future generations do not always see things through the eyes of its founder. McIlhenny Co. is at a historical crossroads and its future will be determined by a generation of McIlhennys who may decide that it is time finally to sell the company to the highest bidder rather than make the effort to keep it the tightly controlled family business that it has been for more than 140 years.

Jeffrey Rothfeder has written a well-researched history, complete with interviews of many McIlhenny family members and key employees, a history that tells the story of a fascinating family and business. McIlhenny Co. may not serve as a blueprint for future businesses, but it is hard to argue with what the company has achieved across parts of three centuries.

Rated at: 4.0

The Quill Awards

Speaking of book awards, it's getting close to the big show that presents the only book awards that are voted on by the reading public. The Quill Awards happen in New York on October 22 and most NBC stations will broadcast the awards show as a special presentation on October 27.

Monday evening, Oct. 22, at Manhattan's Jazz at Lincoln Center, Byrne puts on the third-annual Quill Awards with Today's Al Roker and Ann Curry hosting, Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central opening and an A-list of celebrities presenting as a score of authors are honored--Al Gore and former Time magazine Managing Editor Walter Isaacson among them. Roker's production company will produce the evening for an hour-long broadcast airing Oct. 27.

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But aren't there already too many book awards? Byrne's rationale for creating the Quills: The other awards are all chosen and handed out by the industry, to the industry. "It's inside baseball," he says. "The Quills are the only awards on which the public does the voting."

Most of the awards have been announced already, but it should be fun to see some of the glitz involved in the process of handing them out. I think that all but "Book of the Year" have been announced, but here's a short list of winners from a few of the 19 different categories being awarded.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road won in General Fiction, while Diane Setterfield will be honored as Debut Author of the Year for The Thirteenth Tale. Other winners include Al Gore (History/Current Events/Political), Nora Roberts (Romance), Amy Sedaris (Humor), Walter Isaacson (Biography) and David Wiesner (Children's Picture Book).

It should be fun if I can just remember to turn on the television that night. I've been out of the habit of watching TV for so long now that I tend to let this kind of thing slide right past me before I realize I've missed it

The Booker Prize Is Evil

British author Robert Harris, while admitting that there is no way that he would ever win the Booker Prize, decided to tell the world how little that bothers him. In an interview with Lucy Cavendish, he condemned the whole process:

"The Booker Prize is evil," he says. "No great authors in the past, from Dickens through to Kipling, Waugh, Joyce, Orwell etc would have had anything to do with it.

"The Booker casts a long shadow over literary life. It has swollen like a monstrous boil obscuring anything that was ever good about it. It encourages and fosters the difference between supposed 'literary' novels and other perfectly good books. It reveres a certain type of novel yet great writers of the world may never have featured in it and lots of books that are short-listed in it disappear without a trace."

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Harris says he wants to speak out against the Booker because he feels so strongly about it. "I can see it probably looks a bit dog-in-the-manger as there is no conceivable way I would ever win it, or should win it," he says, "but that's not why I am saying this. The Booker ruins people's lives. It does a disservice to the public and it is damaging to authors and the industry, especially this hateful, ghastly long list. Authors feel their book has failed even before it's been published if it is not selected."

He says that when the prize first started it was probably to help bring the work of not so well known authors into the public realm. "I can see for a book like Yann Martel's Life of Pi it is a good thing, but over the past five or so years the judges have kowtowed to the worst sort of political correctness. It's hard to think of anyone who is non-PC or doesn't deal with the concerns of the sexual minority or colonial guilt who could possibly make it on to the list. The books are all written in the same way. They are elegant, elegiac but dull and dry. They do not connect with their readers. They are just deadening to read."

He saves the worst of his criticism though for the actual prize ceremony itself. "I go to the dinner and there are only about 20 authors there out of about 1,000 people. The rest are all the agents and the buyers and it's full of ghastly phoney hangers-on. In fact, I think the Booker sucks the oxygen out of the air.

It has been milked by publicists. No wonder that book Crystal is selling so well. It is probably a more enjoyable read."

Sour grapes? You decide, but I have to think that's largely what's going on here since Harris writes the kind of novel that is unlikely to ever win any of the various literary prizes handed out each year. He's a fine writer of a certain type of book, and I've enjoyed several of them. The whole tone of what he has to say in this interview makes me wonder if Cavendish didn't just catch him on a particularly bad day when he was feeling resentful about the caste system that exists in the publishing world, a system in which authors seem to have been generally relegated into two classes: those who seek to top the bestseller lists and those who have literary aspirations.

Harris has sold a large number of books in the past. Sounds like he needs a little love from his peers to make him feel better about his career.

Robots Who Read and Stolen Books

I found a couple of short, but intriguing, little news items this morning. Both of the articles had me shaking my head in wonder and ending with a smile because they are so "out of the box" and not something that I expected to ever see.

The first bit comes from EarthTimes.org and talks about a German "robot" that has been given a two-year job of reading historically important books and storing them in its digital memory.

One of Germany's greatest treasuries of books, the Bavarian State Library in Munich, said Tuesday it had set a robot to work "reading" the books and storing more than 7.5 million images of the pages in its digital memory. The device, which uses gentle suction and a breath of air to turn the pages, is to work until 2009, digitizing 37,000 German-language books dating from the period 1518 to 1600.

Library officials said the images would then be put on the internet.

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The robot can scan up to 1,500 books an hour, with human staff only having to put each book into position. Library staff say they are confident it will not damage the priceless old books.

And then there's news from PressTV about a "most stolen" index being used at the huge Frankfort Book Fair to predict which new books are going to sell best later this year.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is using the 'most stolen book' index to help publishers estimate public interest in their new publications.

Bild am Sonntag and Germany's ZDF television have prepared lists of the most stolen titles from 15 leading German publishers' stands in the Frankfurt trade fair grounds.

"The most-stolen books are usually the most-sold later on," said Claudia Hanssen of the Goldmann Verlag publishing house.

"They're the popular ones and are most likely to end up on the best-seller lists," Hanssen added.

You just never know, do you?

O.J.'s Book "like staring straight into an open sewer"

Book reviewer Rod Liddle, in the first two paragraphs of his review in the Sunday Times of London, completely destroyed O.J. Simpson's supposed book and everyone responsible for placing the thing in bookstores around the world.

It's hard to fault anything that Liddle had to say.

Now, here’s a thing. A book that is simultaneously morally disgusting and excruciatingly dull. A filthy little project that, although extremely brief (there’s a lot of padding in those 208 pages), succeeds in both boring the reader beyond endurance and making him gag. Hurry, hurry, while stocks last, etc.

On the other hand, the stuff about the book — how it came into being and why — is quite compelling, in the same way that staring straight into an open sewer can be quite compelling for a while. What’s going to float along next? That old thing horrified fascination, I suppose.

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Now, why did the Goldmans decide, in effect, to collaborate with the repulsive man who had killed their son? One answer — which you can believe, if you like — is in the lengthy foreword to the book from the Goldman family. Was it for the dosh, the greenbacks, the moolah? No, no, no — heaven forfend! “So here we sit,” they write, “having to take on this incredibly controversial book project, which many deemed abhorrent, disgusting and dirty, and turn it into something powerful and positive. Having read the manuscript in great detail, we are more determined than ever to put this product out into the world as an exposé of a murderer.”

Ah, we see. Well, I suppose they’ve turned it into something that their bank manager would undoubtedly see as “powerful and positive”; but the whole world suspects that Simpson was the murderer, particularly after he was found liable in the civil suit. So your point is? Indeed, the entire foreword is an emetic, prolonged whine of self-justification ineffectively masking self-interest and financial greed.

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Incidentally, the family of Nicole Brown Simpson objected to the whole shebang. Thank the Lord, you might be thinking, for a bereaved family with a sense of dignity and decency. But then you learn that they applied, unsuccessfully, to the court for a chunk of the profits.

The “If I Did It” bit, by OJ himself (via the third-rate, bland hackery of the benighted Fenjves, employing the grammar, the turn of phrase, the recourse to cliché, and all the psychological insight of a moron), is not remotely worth reading.

Well, that about says it all. No one involved in this fiasco seems to be thinking about much but how much money they can squeeze from the brutal deaths of two people. How horrible is that?

Read the whole column here.

A Decent End for Unwanted Books

By now everyone has seen numerous stories about books being thrown out by libraries as part of the regular culling process that has to go on if new books are to find a home on library shelves. In with the new, out with the old. Libraries have limited shelf space, much of it now devoted to DVDs and CDs, so that's the rule by which they live and die.

We all wish that most of the discards could be given a second life by being placed in the hands of hospital patients, those in prisons, and group homes. But we all know that a substantial percentage of them simply end up taking up space in some landfill. That's why it's good to see that there is an alternative to that kind of waste. Colorado's Post Independent tells what happened to leftover books at one of the state's regional libraries.

Donated by citizens or culled from the library shelves, they were damaged or out-of-date, the books had remained unsold at the Basalt River Days' book sale in mid-August. Schools and individuals had been notified they were free, and a few had been rescued. But the rest silently soaked up whatever page-curling sun and cover-swelling moisture the elements dealt them.

Not so long ago, the land where the library now stands was marshy, and these books might have slowly sunk into the mix of water, bugs and roots.

Something similar was in store for them tonight.

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So Hans Ayers, a friend who works at West Glenwood's Caca Loco composting site, met me at the library with his van. The books on the library porch were about to be destroyed and reborn again - as fertilizer. Moving them from the porch to the van was the first step in their voyage into Caca Loco's "soup": the batter of paper, wood chips and sanitation waste that, properly mixed, drained, steamed and strained, becomes the fertilizer that feeds many of our valley's trees and plants.

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The Caca Loco compost site at the South Canyon landfill is a busy and smelly place nestled among empty, sweet-smelling hills. Dust swirls in the air. Trucks beep as they back up to dump their loads of wood, cardboard and other paper waste: food packaging, milk cartons, tissues, shredded paper and magazines.

Now there's one stinky story that actually made me smile and feel a little better about the fate of unwanted and obsolete books.