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 delis 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 artisanal 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 chile de arbol pepper. On the other hand, Jamaica's Pickapeppa red hot sauce has disappeared from grocery shelves and only the mild and sweet Pickapeppa meat sauce remains available in stores. But you can get all the Pickapeppa sauces online.

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 habanero peppers they can consume in one sitting. So, there is a vigorous underground market in habanero 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.

It seems that eschewing hot sauce is becoming politically correct. The James Beard Society refused to serve me hot sauce at a barbecue event and chili cook-off. Many restaurants will not carry hot sauce. 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. Today, try to get hot sauce in a French restaurant!