Tabasco – podictionary 847
Sep 3rd, 2008 | 
Lyn Hancock is an author and has written a children’s book entitled Tabasco the Saucy Raccoon. She asked me to look into the word Tabasco.
I don’t mind hot food but I was a little taken aback when I visited the website for Tabasco sauce and saw that they sell the stuff in gallon jugs.
Tabasco sauce is named for the type of peppers used in making it and in turn those peppers are named after a place in Mexico.
This is a similar sort of naming convention to jalapeno and habanero peppers. Jalapeno peppers are named after a Mexican city and habanero peppers are named after Havana, the capital of Cuba.
The company that makes Tabasco sauce makes it in a few different flavors including habanero which is supposed to be about three times as hot as regular Tabasco sauce and—even more incredibly to me—is also sold in gallon jugs.
I’m sweating just thinking of it.
I wonder if it’s legal to ship that stuff; isn’t it a hazardous material?
The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that the very first citation for Tabasco in English was from 1876. Yet the Tabasco website claims that Edmund McIlhenny started selling Tabasco sauce nine years before that.
There’s more confusion too.
The first citation from the OED is credited to Joaquin Miller. Miller was a kind of American frontier poet. Wikipedia describes his career as including “a variety of occupations, including [a] mining-camp cook (who came down with scurvy from only eating what he cooked), [a] lawyer and a judge, [a] newspaper writer, [a] Pony Express rider, and [a] horse thief.”
His story as noted in the OED is First Families in the Sierras and the appearance of the word Tabasco is from a scene in a western bar named the Howling Wilderness Saloon.
The bar itself was just a plank laid across a wall of sandbags intended to protect the barkeep from stray bullets. The drink selection is described as
- Old Tiger
- Bad Eye
- Forty Rod
- Rat Pizen
- Rot Gut
- Hell’s Delight, and
- Howling Modoc
“all made from the same decoction of bad rum, worse tobasco, and first-class cayenne pepper. The difference in proportion of ingredients made the difference in infernal drinks.”
The other day I did an episode on Caesar with a side-track into the drink Bloody Caesar, which is like a Bloody Mary so I guess there is precedent for talk about spicy drinks. But drinks made with rum, Tabasco and cayenne pepper sound unlikely.
More confusing, when I checked Google Book Search and Amazon I found both sources had the text of this book but where the OED found the word tobasco Google and Amazon have the word tobacco!
Could the OED have read it wrong?
I tend to doubt it. Especially since I’ve come across other old documents that have been scanned into software and been “autocorrected” incorrectly.
And I’d think that drinks made with “bad rum, worse tobacco, and first-class cayenne” would be even more unlikely.
So here’s where I get to be an amateur lexicography detective.
I see that the OED definition number 3 for the word habanero reads
“A Latin American alcoholic drink, typically distilled from sugar cane”
with a first citation date within a few years of Tabasco. I wonder if
- the OED got it right with that first Tabasco citation and
- instead of referring to the pepper sauce that first Tabasco might have been another rum alternative.
One more note on Joaquin Miller.
I was stunned to see that he is the author of a little rhyme that hangs on my parents’ wall and has done my entire life:
In men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot
I hesitate to draw the line
Between the two where God has not.
