Tabasco® Sauce was being sold in England as early as 1878
The McIllhenney Company of Louisiana sells a range of hot sauces readily available in the UK. The oldest and best known of the company’s offerings is the ‘classic’ or ‘original’ Tabasco® Sauce made only from fermented ripe chillies, salt and vinegar. The result is a red and somewhat viscous liquid that is an essential ingredient in prawn cocktails and Bloody Marys.
According to the write-up on its packaging (consisting of a glass bottle and outer box), the critical date for the start-up of Tabasco® Sauce is 1868. Given the state of travel, transport and communication at the time, the sauce was being sold by a London business quite quickly afterwards – an early mention of its availability was made in the 1878 cookery book Culinary Jottings for Madras written by ‘Wyvern’, otherwise known as Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert.
Wyvern was an English soldier serving in India, and he wrote his book to help female compatriots successfully carry out their responsibilities of food preparation in what was for them a hostile environment. The book is, according to the title page, ‘based upon modern English, and continental principles’ of cookery, and includes discussions of ingredients and techniques; lots of recipes and menus; and dubious advice on managing native staff.
Hidden among the work’s 297 pages is Wyvern’s short, easily overlooked testimonial to Tabasco® Sauce. He described its flavour as ‘very good’ and thought it was better than chilli-vinegar, a popular condiment at the time. Smitten with its quality, he tried convincing the expat community to import it: ‘I strongly advise any of my readers who write to England for their stores not to forget to ask for a little bottle of American “Tabasco” or quintessence of cayenne’.
Something of an expert on “Tabasco”, Wyvern knew the sauce was being sold in London ‘by Messrs. Jackson and Co., Piccadilly’. He was also familiar with its packaging (a stoppered bottle that dispensed the sauce drop-by-drop); cost (‘half a crown’); and degree of spiciness (‘two drops in each basin of soup is generally found enough’).
Wyvern obviously had first hand experiences with “Tabasco”, and probably imported it for his own use. He liked it so much that other expats were encouraged to import it, too, though to what extent they did so may never be known. There’s no doubt that he knew his stuff, and despite the brevity of his account, Wyvern provides important insights into the sauce’s early presence in England and perhaps India.
To read first hand what ‘Wyvern’ had to say about “Tabasco”, see page 29 of the 1878 (first edition) of his Culinary Jottings for Madras: a treatise in thirty chapters on reformed cookery for Anglo-Indian exiles based on modern English, and continental principles with twenty-five menus for little dinners worked out in detail. The book can be found in digital form at Archive.org, and was last accessed by me on 28 March, 2025.
To put ‘Wyvern’ and Culinary Jottings for Madras in context, see Leslie Forbes’ introduction to the fifth edition, 1885, published as a facsimile by Prospect Books in 2007.
Tabasco® Sauce may have been spread all over the world in the Victorian era
In the brief piece he wrote on “Tabasco” for his book Culinary Jottings for Madras, Wyvern implied that it was customary for English expats in India to have provisions shipped to them from home. If they were following his advice and importing bottles of “Tabasco” with their other provisions, then it’s possible that expats living anywhere in the British Empire (including Africa, the Caribbean and Mid-East) were importing it, too. Assuming that this was a common practice, then the quintessential American hot sauce could have travelled all over the Victorian world by means of a distribution system centred in England. Though fun to contemplate, solid evidence is needed to support such a premise.