Above image: African Americans picking green tabasco peppers for Cornay Moss’s Green Heart Tabasco Sauce. Cornay his two sons, their family puppy, and wife are looking on to the far left.
Last September I took a day trip from my yearly fall trip to New Orleans. I headed out to New Iberia, a two hour drive west of the Crescent City for a hot sauce excursion. I met Marcia, the executive director of the Bayou Teche Museum, which has a great collection of New Iberia Louisiana hot sauce artifacts. She led us on a tour of the former Frank Red Hot Sauce factory and showed us the Estilette family’s final resting place in the New Iberia Catholic Cemetery. Adam and Constance Estilette originated the recipe and with their children grew the peppers and ran the factory for Jacob Frank, who bottled Franks Hot Sauce in Cincinnati. Her husband, a renowned New Orleans chef even fed us with maque choux, a Cajun spicy creamed corn and homemade boudin sausage, a cousin to our goetta. It was amazing. Then they sent us on our way to Avery Island for the Tabasco experience and with the great recommendation to try both flavors of Tabasco ice cream at the store.
We drove the 20 or so minutes south to the original Tabasco factory and took the tour. Although the peppers are now grown in South America, they still grow peppers for seeds on site in a greenhouse you can tour. Disregarding the many signs NOT to pick and eat the peppers, I did and my mouth was on fire the rest of the tour, fueled by 50,000 scovilles of heat, not diluted by salt and vinegar as in the sauce. As great as the history is that they present, there’s one story that’s not told at the Tabasco experience and that’s the one behind their green sauce. It’s now a mild jalapeno green sauce, but in the early 20th century it was a green tabasco sauce, a business scavenged by copywright infringement from a man named Cornay Moss and his Green Heart Tabasco Company of New Iberia.
Rewind to 1869 when Edmund McIlhenny sold his first bottles of Tabasco sauce in perfume bottles. He had gotten seed from a plantation neighbor Maunsel White, who had gotten seeds from a returning soldier of the Mexican American war. This soldier had seen, eaten, and fallen in love with the heat of this strange pepper from the Mexican state of Tabasco. Even though the Maunsel White papers prove otherwise, the McIlhenny family to this day holds tight that their ancestor obtained pepper seeds on his own and invented American Louisiana style hot sauce.
Above image: Maunsel White, the inventor of American Louisiana style hot sauce.
Above image: Edmund McIlhenny, inventor of McIlhenny’s Tabasco sauce.
The interesting story is that tabasco sauce was really a happy accident, as most food inventions are. Maunsel just wanted to dry the peppers he received and grew like the Mexicans did with other peppers. He could then throw the whole pepper in a stew and add some heat. What he found was that this strange new tabasco pepper was too oily and juicy to be dried and to be preserved, had to be mashed, set with salt and then strong vinegar added. The end result was a preserved pepper sauce that could be added to stews and dishes and thus was born American Louisiana style hot sauce.
By 1850, Maunsel had articles and ads in New Orleans newspapers that gave him credit for growing and proliferating his new peppers to neighbors and anyone willing to grow them. While we now know that capsicum, the heat giving element of peppers is good for heart health, the new Orleans papers also said, “none of White’s negros came down with cholera,” due to his giving them tabasco sauce regularly. This makes us wonder if, like Jack Daniels’ whiskey, it was an unnamed enslaved person who actually came up with that first hot sauce formula on White’s Deer Range plantation. In Plaquemines, Louisiana.
Above image: John Avery McIlhenny, son of the founder and chief litigator for the family.
Getting back to the green sauce story. Founder Edmund McIlhenny dies in 1890, but not before he writes an extensive memoir. He didn’t even mention his tabasco sauce making empire, and more lamented the loss of his banking fortune due to the post Civil War economy. But two of his sons – Edmund Jr. and John saw the future of a family enterprise in hot sauce. The eventually would patent Tabasco, even though it was geographical and the name of the pepper, not a brand name, and would sue anyone who used the name Tabasco in their sauce.
One of those first guys they went after was Cornay P. Moss, president of the Green Heart Tabasco Sauce Company. John McIlhenny became sort of the family’s litigation attorney against anyone using the word tabasco. John sued Moss and his company in years of litigation, costing the Mosses nearly $250,000, an enormous fortune at that time. The Mosses countersued the McIllhennys for loss to their business and were compensated a measly $5000. In order to pay for the costs of the first suit, the Mosses ended up selling the tabasco sauce portion of their business to McIllhenny’s, which ended their competition. Problem gloriously solved for the McIllhennys. Although the Mosses continued to grow and sell peppers, it no where near compensated for the loss of their hot sauce business.
Above image: The former Cosmpolitan Hotel in New Orleans, now the Astor Hotel.
So, in 1917, Moss checked into the Cosmopolitan Hotel in New Orleans, now called the Astor Hotel. On Wednesday, January 10, 1917, Cornay Moss shot himself in the temple, ending his life. His handsome photo and his entire suicide letter were published in The Weekly Iberian three days later. In the note addressed to his dear “Pug” he said:
I have learned to know this world of hypocrisy so well,
that I do not care to continue to live in it. I hate to do this on account
of you and our boys, but life on this planet has grown intolerable to me.
As you are familiar with every detail of our business and eminently
qualified to handle things, you are to make such business or other
investments as in your judgment seems best in the future.
I have no fear for the future of my soul because I know that I am a better
man at heart and in fact than 90 per cent of them all, and I do not believe
that over 90 per cent of them are going to the worst place in the hereafter.
it is my one wish that our two boys stick together through this life, and if
practicable that you always be near, if not with them. I leave all the love
I possess with you and our boys and may God be with you all. Good-bye.
The litigation with the McIlhennys had so affected Moss that he couldn’t bear living, a true tragedy.
History soon forgot Moss and his Green Heart Tobasco company, but John McIlhenny didn’t stop going after anyone who used tabasco in their name. From 1922-1929, he sued Bernard Francois Trappey, their former blacksmith at the factory, who left in 1898 and started his own tabasco hot sauce company with his ten sons. Trappey lost the battle and renamed his hot sauce Red Devil, which is still being made today.
Cornay Moss requested that the Green Heart logo be made on his tomb, in the New Iberia Catholic Cemetery (where other hot sauce families like the Estilettes of Frank’s Red hot sauce are buried). But either that didn’t happen or it has since fallen off – it looks like there was once a plaque on the top of his gravestone that is no longer there which might have held the company logo.
Above image: Cornay Moss’s final resting place in New Iberia’s Catholic Hot Sauce Cemetery.
Other hot sauce entrepreneurs saw the repercussions of making a hot sauce with tabasco peppers and going up against the behemoth McIlhenny family. So, that’s what led Buillards, Franks, Crystal (the Baumer family) and Louisiana (the Brown family) and others to make their hot sauces with cayenne instead of tabasco.
The same year Moss took his life, 1917, was the same year Jacob Frank first travelled to New Iberia to scout hot sauce makers and met Adam Estillette, forming the partnership that would become Frank’s Red Hot Sauce.
Above image: The Estilettes who originated Frank’s Red Hot Sauce recipe and operated the Frank’s plant in New Iberia.
And now the American hot sauce market is the largest growth sector of the condiments category in retail grocery. John McIlhenny’s head would explode today at the tens of thousands of hot sauce competitors to their OG tabasco hot sauce.
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