Hot sauce has gone underground! Far from the halcyon days in the 90’s
when certain stores sold only hot sauce and your mail box was stuffed
with hot sauce catalogs, hot sauce has dwindled in importance and
propinquity. Many restaurants do not provide any hot sauce. Most
restaurants carry only plain Tabasco. Gramercy Tavern serves Tabasco in
a small bowl with a spoon in order to disguise its use even on pulled
pork barbeque. Some delies on the Upper West Side dilute Tabasco with water.

Oddly, the hot sauce aficionado has both a larger variety of choices
from main stream hot sauce manufacturers while smaller artesianal
providers are slowly disappearing. In grocery stores, McIlhenny’s
Tabasco now comes in original, chipotle, sweet and garlic flavors all
made with the traditional tabasco pepper base. And Cholula, which makes
a delicious red sauce made out of pequin peppers, now produces a
flavored chili-garlic sauce dumbed down with arbol pepper. On the other
hand, Jamaica’s Pickapepa red hot sauce has disappeared from grocery
shelves. Only the mild and sweet Pickapeppa meat sauce remains available.

Of course, there are still hidden beneath the surface habanero (scotch
bonnet or bull’s nose) addicts – each trying to outdo the other in the
amount of heat they consume. They usually purchase products from
catalogs sent to an exclusive mailing list. Personally, I don’t like
habanero peppers because they taste like a tin can, but many in the
underground pride themselves on the number of peppers they can consume
in one sitting. So, there is a vigorous underground market in habenero
sauces, salsas and rubs with names like Sudden Death, Muerte, Kick Ass
and Hell Fire. Most of these sauces appeal to the adolescent side of hot
sauce gourmets.

Has eschewing hot sauce become politically correct? A few years ago, the
James Beard Society refused to serve hot sauce during a barbecue and chili cook-off. Today, many restaurants will not carry hot sauce, while other establishments dilute or dumb down the sauce they provide on request. And the selection of hot sauces on grocery shelves is becoming fewer and sweeter – more fruit and a lot less pepper.

It’s an odd phenomenon in the United States that hot sauce is disappearing while Latin American immigration is increasing. My Huguenot ancestors left France partly because they consumed dried hot peppers. My grandfather and his brothers used to eat dried hot peppers from peanut bowls on living room tables. Try today to get hot sauce in a French restaurant!