Oddities and Obsessions

Oh, Tabasco, how much do I love thee?

The narrow bottle, wedged next to the napkins and salt and pepper, has always been a part of my earliest food memories and proceeds almost anything else on the table. It is a sauced etched in my mind, its hot and tangy flavor surely a part of my DNA by now. I suspect it’s this way for millions of people, too. I’ve just never been able to get enough of the stuff.

I got to spend a few days in Avery Island, Louisiana, home to the McIlhenny Company that makes the Tabasco hot sauce. It’s been made here since its invention in 1868, its recipe unchanged for over 142 years. And if something is good, why change it? To make Tabasco sauce, you only need a few things: peppers, salt, vinegar and time. But Tabasco does indeed have a secret ingredient that makes it so extremely special: the people that have made the sauce for generations.

(and no, there are no people IN the sauce, please don’t get all Sweeny Hot Sauce Todd on me, please)

To visit Avery Island and the McIlhenny Company is like walking into a textbook on regional Louisiana history, followed by a textbook on American history. It’s a family-owned company that was founded by Edmund McIlhenny and is still run by the family today. In fact, many of the employees have been with the company for generations. And Avery Island itself is quite special. Located in Iberia Parish, Avery Island is located on top of a salt dome and has been involved in the salt trade even longer than the production of Tabasco. These two things go hand in hand, we’ll get to that in a few.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret:  I go overboard.

Being born with an impassioned gene isn’t really all that bad, though. It allows me to focus on things so acutely and really dive into subjects that might otherwise not have interested me. It allowed me to learn how to rollerskate in the 70s, leaving all the other kids biting my dust (or maybe it was my purple satin shorts, which for a 7-year old boy is probably the fast track to neighborhood ridicule, but so what, I ask?) It’s kept me interested in my job for this long, helped me wrangle and eat my own snails, and allowed me to learn how to play a handful of musical instruments.

It’s also the reason I have found myself up to my eyeballs in pears.

Now, a pear isn’t something you always have around like an onion or a lemon. They’re a truly seasonal fruit and best enjoyed when mother nature tells us they’re ready. And because of this I don’t really think of pears throughout the year. It’s not like I find myself grilling in the middle of July and then suddenly scream out “OH MY GOD THIS RIB SOOOOOOOO NEEDS A PEAR RIGHT NOW!”  If anything I’ll scream out because my cocktail is empty. But that’s a whole ‘nuther blog.  But my point is this: when I taste that first early fall pear I know I’m on a collision course with that powerful strange facet of my personality.

First of all, I thought, no, assumed, I was popular, and all kinds of people were going to be asking to take me out to celebrate. I didn’t throw myself a party which I often do, so then I was thinking that some of my party regulars will get that I’m wanting to celebrate with every one of them individually, or in small groups. I’m not popular, I’m delusional.

It started kinda great. Two days before my birthday Robin and Libbie took me for a celebratory dinner at the Palm. Then on my birthday, I woke up to an email from Huffington Post saying the piece I wrote had been posted that day. Which I thought was a great sign because the story I wrote is all about my fear of dying at a young age like my mother. Then a small group of girlfriends met me for lunch on the patio of the Malibu Hotel where I was spending the weekend.   We ate, laughed, and I received some lovely gifts and amazing sentimental notes that I will always cherish. Libbie is re-gifting cards to me from our long friendship. So, there was this loving thing I wrote to her in the 1970’s about how beautiful she is and how much I love her, and on the other side she wrote an update to me. Kimberly wrote a card with words that made me cry (Libbie’s card made me cry too). It was going smoothly.

So I’m playing tourist, mooching off my galpal Corinne’s retired Redwood City, CA dream life.  Boy, has she ever set herself up well in her hometown, recently redeveloped into a vacation paradise ideal for a freeloader like me.  Not only is her late parents’ house, in which she grew up, replete with a view of verdant hillsides and well-tended homes – and a large garden full of a festival of fruits in rotating seasons of ripeness – she’s got the sensuous cuddle cat and the darling ditzy dog, and the friendly, easy kind of community about which we all fantasize when things start to sloooow down.

Redwood City has Zydeco dancing for free with a great Cajun group in the renovated town square on Friday nights all summer, in a great contrast of stately buildings and Southern hoedown hick apparel.  It features screenings and dance classes at the local community center every week all year long. People actually picnic in its parks.  It’s got great walking areas, fine dining, funky shops with great one-of a-kind finds, a train station, and, holy shades of civilization, all the familiar franchises plus a Whole Foods with slightly different fare from local farms than the Los Angeles local branch.

They sell ostrich eggs.