Bird Pepper Sauce
Before there was Tabasco Sauce (later 1860s), there was Jamaican bird pepper sauce, imported into the United States since the country’s founding. Piquant, popular, and potent, this preparation was prepared and shipped in casks, yet retailed in bottles. Using the small bird pepper-- Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum—native to the West Indies, northern South America and southern North America—the sauce was composed of sherry vinegar and pureed ripe red bird peppers aged in a cask with salt. Besides the sauce, in the early decades of the 19th century large shipments of bird peppers were shipped into American port cities. Some dried, some fresh. The newspapers printed stories had to made red pepper powder from them:
E. M. Ford, American Farmer (July 1, 1825), 7: “It is called in Louisiana, the bird pepper, and is infinitely more pungent than any of its kin dried. The lady who furnished the seed, sends a small sample of the pepper, prepared for the table; and as her manner of doing it is much superior to the process one of your correspondents furnished some time ago, it may not be amiss to give it. Put the pods into a coarse paper bag, and hang it on the breast of the kitchen chimney until perfectly dry. They will then be easily reduced to necessary fineness in a covered iron mortar, and the beautiful red colour and genuine flavor be perfectly preserved.”
Though the pepper was native to the Americas and was a foundation of Carib seasoning, North Americans associated the peppers with Africans because black West Indians embraced the spice and were a driving force in the creation of the sauce. In the 1830s it was not unusual to see papers in Baltimore and Philadelphia advertising “African Bird Pepper” particularly as an alternative to Cayenne: “Families and Eating Houses will find it to their interest as well as to their Healths to make use of this article, as poisonous minerals and earthly substances have been detected in the very highly colored red Cayenne” [Baltimore American and Commercial Daily Advertiser (February 2, 1833), 3].
Since the pepper was exported to West Africa and underwent cultivation there, and in Madagascar, it is not entirely beyond reason that some might have been imported from these locales. Indeed one of the better strains of bird pepper now available at American nurseries derives from these African cultivars, the Zimbabwe Bird Pepper. But the great bulk of importations came from the West Indies and went to ports North of Baltimore. In the south the pepper had become a kitchen garden staple and one could make both “American cayenne” and bird pepper sauce at home.
Two commercial varieties of pepper sauce came on the market in the 19th century—one using unripe green bird peppers and sherry vinegar that came from Antigua, the other, using ripe bird peppers mashed, cleaned of seeds, salted, and fermented with vinegar from Jamaica. There were two approaches to the red sauce—one roasting the peppers for greater depth of flavor, the other using them fresh. Sold in angular glass bottles they were found in hotel dining rooms and eating houses everywhere in the antebellum period. New Orleans called its sauce piment zo-zo sauce. In the South West the pepper sauce was made from the Chiltepin strain of bird pepper and had a bit more Scovill scorch. The question whether an eastern strain of Bird Pepper naturalized in Florida and the Gulf Coast is contentious. What is not in dispute is that a form of the pepper adapted to the Orange Groves and developed rather long fruits. These longer chiltepins became “grove peppers.” An illustration of Klinger’s Grove Pepper heads this newsletter.