Every time you go to a diner or restaurant, there’s a bottle of hot sauce on the table- probably Tabasco or Cholula. Well, the history of hot sauce predates these popular condiments. The pioneers, and the first people to make hot sauce, were probably the Aztecs in 7000 BC . They made this by mixing water and ground up chili peppers; this was the starting point of hot sauce. They did not just use this sauce on food, they used it to cure colds and muscle pain. They also used it as a weapon and would throw it into their enemies’ eyes. 

Chili peppers came to the Europeans during the Columbian Exchange in the 1500s. One of the things this means is that all the traditional Indian and Indonesian food we think of as being spicy couldn’t have come around until the Columbian Exchange. 

The inventor of what we would consider a modern hot sauce would be a man by the name of  Edmund McILhenny. He bought a pack of Tabasco seeds from a store. The Tabasco pepper is an offshoot of the chili pepper. With these he made the first modern hot sauce and began selling it at $1 a bottle.  The bottle that we see today was popularized by Bergman’s Diablo Pepper Sauce, which used a five inch tall bottle with a narrow neck. 

Then, the Scoville scale came around because hot sauce had become so widespread they needed a unit of measurement. Wilbur Scoville, who invented it, would test it by taking one cup of the substance in question, like Tabasco sauce, and putting in small amounts of water until it’s not spicy anymore. For instance, Tabasco sauce has a Scoville rating of 3,750. The chemical that makes the Chili Peppers spicy is called capsaicin (C18H27NO3), and now today you have a wonderful way to spice up every meal. Chili Peppers are also a great source of B6, vitamin A, copper, iron and potassium.