Tabasco Pepper

Long before it flavored a single bottle of hot sauce, this fiery little pepper was already part of daily life for Indigenous peoples across Mexico and Central America, who grew it for food and reached for it as a warming remedy on cold, sluggish days. It takes its name from the Mexican state of Tabasco, where the plant still grows along the coast, and it was seeds carried home from that region after the Civil War that a Louisiana planter named Edmund McIlhenny used to found the hot sauce that made the pepper famous worldwide. Traditional herbalists across the Americas have long used cayenne-type peppers like this one as a circulatory stimulant, believing that a touch of internal heat could rouse tired digestion and coax warmth back into cold hands and feet. It lives a happy double life to this day, equally at home on the spice shelf and in the traditional herbal cabinet.