Sure guys, we always eat Tabasco with pudding." Really? Are you sure? Taking lunch at the McIlhenny family headquarters on the Avery Island estate, deep in Louisiana's Cajun country and home of Tabasco hot sauce, I'm not convinced this isn't just some macho marketing trick from the Tabasco man. A display of bravado so ridiculous it might just lure us, some proud Europeans, into proving we're not soft either - and can also eat some of that famous hot sauce with anything we like. Well, come on then, trick or no trick, let's have some! Put some chipotle on my butterscotch!
A couple of nervous tongue-tingles later, I'm feeling quite pleased. I seem to have come through the experience unscathed. However, I've also acquiesced in Paul McIlhenny's master plan for world domination. For although most of us probably do have a bottle of Tabasco in our cupboards which is fished out once in a while to spice up a Bloody Mary or add bite to cheese on toast, the impression is that for the owners of the world's best-selling chilli sauce, this sort of low-level addiction just isn't enough.
Witness first the vinaigrette cut with green Tabasco sauce (to be fair, the mildest of the five varieties that now make up the Tabasco chilli sauce stable); then the heavy dose of original Tabasco going into an already spicy jambalaya; and finally, perhaps most surprising of all, that liberal sprinkling of the new smokey chipotle Tabasco on the butterscotch sauce for pudding. They live their lives by hot sauce in Louisiana, as the estate's head cooper Donald Alexander - built like the barrels he fixes - explains: "Food isn't the same without it," he says. "I like to cook with it. I like it in restaurants. I like to abuse it!"
For the three prizewinners in this year's Academy of Culinary Arts Awards for Excellence, for whom this trip to Lousiana was part of their prize, taste is perhaps a more delicate matter. Rachel Humphrey is now senior sous chef at London's Le Gavroche, while Luke Frost (standing in for the top-scorer in the pastry section, Ben Batchelor) works at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons in Great Milton, Oxfordshire, under Raymond Blanc. Not the kind of establishments where you'd find chilli on your bavarois. Service section winner Gaetan Morillon, a waiter at London's private dining club Morton's - with his cheeks still flushing from the jambalaya - looks as if he isn't going to risk the chipotle-boosted butterscotch at all.
But by the end of the week, even Morillon's palate had hardened up to the Lousiana punch. Hot spicing as well as supersize quantities of food were, you see, coming from every direction - you had to succumb. Not that this policy was such a sacrifice, especially when we were treated by the McIlhennys to a morning out on the bayou, entertained by a five-piece old-time Cajun band, taken on an airboat trip and fed from a huge urn of freshly boiled local seafood. These blue point crabs and shrimps - the biggest tiger prawns you've ever seen, to those not used to America's sense of scale - were all cooked in a blend of Cajun seasoning. This seasoning varies with every blend, but usually includes salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, chilli powder, onion and garlic powder, plus sometimes mustard seed, coriander, even dill seed and herbs like thyme. The prizewinners agreed this was one of the best meals we had experienced, as much for the setting as for the trays and trays of fresh, meaty seafood. And judging from the piles of bones left, it's obvious that after a while the seasoning gets quite addictive.
But the meal also cemented the charm of Cajun cooking. Regional cooking is not something you immediately associate with the USA. Chains populate every corner across the nation, offering piles of stock burgers, say, chicken or Chinese. But in Cajun land families still cook the traditional dishes of jambalaya, gumbo and all sorts of spiced seafood at home. Each food - sugar, crawfish, beer - is celebrated with its own festival. Although the influence of chef James Beard, founder of America's most famous culinary academy, encouraged many American chefs to go looking for regional cuisines in their own back yards - witness Wolfgang Puck in California - in Louisiana you already had one alive and kicking.
Cajun cooking came with the Cajun people, originally from France but then displaced to Acadia - from where Cajun is derived - and Nova Scotia in Canada. It wasn't until they were kicked out of Nova Scotia by the Brits in 1755 and forced south that they sailed around the coast of Florida and set up shop on the swamps of South-west Louisiana. The swamps were grounds that no one else wanted and which were hard to farm, so it's no surprise that the Cajuns' food, like gumbo and jambalaya, developed as real peasant food: fish or meat, some vegetables and sauce all thrown together - real one-pot cooking.
The history of the southern states is also far more haphazard than the easy peace with which they now conduct themselves, so African, Caribbean, Spanish and French influences are all evident in the mix. Explanations as to the origin of the name jambalaya have included both "jolof", as in the West African rice dish, and "paella".
Cajun food has evolved like everything else. According to Patrick Mold, a Cajun chef who cooks for the McIlhenny family and also runs the Cajun Cookery School, it's common now to find ingredients that wouldn't have been available to the poorer ancestors. "Because of the tradition of still cooking these dishes at home, the restaurants have to be even better," he says.
In New Orleans, where the more sophisticated, less spicy and more noticeably French-influenced Creole cooking had a greater impact on culinary tradition (Creole literally meant those new Americans whose parents were European, French predominantly, and not born in the States), both Creole and Cajun flavours are still very much part of life. Our first - and best - meal in New Orleans was at Susan Spicer's Bayona restaurant. It was a world away from the shellfish feast on the bayou, but retained elements of those traditions. "You can't exist, and certainly can't cook, in a place like this without being influenced by it," she says. "This is manifested in how boldly I may season my food; how I use local ingredients, especially seafood and vegetables, and pork, as both an ingredient and a seasoning; and the use of slow cooking, like 'smothering', stewing and braising."
One dish which Frost, Humphrey and Morillon were treated to was an unadvertised curried crayfish and cream cheese turnover in filo dough which was served to us all before the main courses. "It represents my penchant for using traditional ingredients like crayfish in nontraditional ways," says Spicer. In fact the dish was similar to a pancake we had had that morning at Mother's - a New Orleans institution of real fast food served up by hollerin' ladies, where mass dining doesn't mean it's poorly produced and generations of families pass through the kitchen. But in New Orleans there was proof that the cooking isn't just alive and well in the country or novelty restaurants, but also in the cooking of creative, forward-looking chefs.
Spicer lists two other operations in the area, Brigtsen's in New Orleans ("a wonderful take on contemporary Creole") and Caf‚ des Amis in Breaux Bridge ("doing the same for Cajun food"), as examples. "I think one's heritage, culinary or otherwise, should always have a place in the present," she says, "and I think there are some restaurants trying to carry on or interpret those traditions while staying in step with modern times."
This will be music to the ears of the McIlhennys. Whether these restaurant ever put chilli on their desserts is another matter, but the South's love affair with its food heritage blossoms at all gastronomic levels and isn't likely to fade away. Now they just need those three reps from the Awards of Excellence to carry on the crusade over here: "Now chef, what if we just add a little bit of heat?" ned
Simple sauce that packs a punch
Tabasco is an incredibly simple sauce to make. It was first established by Edmund McIlhenny in about 1868, using the brightly coloured capsicum peppers he had cultivated from Mexico. He crushed them, aged them with salt, then mixed them with vinegar, strained off the excess and got selling. These days the peppers are aged with salt in white oak Bourbon whiskey barrels for up to three years, then blended with vinegar and stirred for several weeks before bottling.
According to Tabasco, its sauce is not as hot as plenty of other sauces. For chilli anoraks, the heat is measured in scovilles. The original Tabasco weighs in at about 2,500 to 5,000 scovilles, the Haba¤ero at about 8,000. The most diabolical sauce on the market claims to be somewhere near 1.5 million.
But Tabasco isn't interested in Homer Simpsonesque chilli-offs. Its sauce, the company says, represents the sophisticated end of the spectrum, aimed at enhancing foods - not taking them over.
Awards for Excellence
The Awards for Excellence are held every year by the Academy of Culinary Arts to recognise and reward the talents of young people working in the industry. Divided into three categories - chefs, pastry chefs and waiters - the awards are designed to test basic as well as advanced skills.
Although it's not strictly a competition (there's no first, second or third place, those who pass a certain grade achieve the standard of excellence) three top-scorers are named out of each year to cook and serve a special awards lunch and are also offered a prize.
Although the deadline for this summer's awards has passed, next year's opens in September with a deadline in November. E-mail info@ academyofculinaryarts.org.ukor telephone 020 8673 6300 for details.
Pork and smoked sausage jambalaya
Ingredients
(Serves six)
1lb cubed pork
1tsp Cajun seasoning
1tbsp vegetable oil
1/2lb sliced smoked sausage
1 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped green bell pepper
1/2 cup chopped celery
1tbsp minced garlic
1tbs dark roux (a flour and butter roux that's often cooked for up to an hour to get the colour right without burning)
1/2 cup water
2 cups rice
31/2 cups beef broth
2 bay leaves
1tsp Tabasco
1/4 cup chopped green onions
2tbs minced parsley
Method
Season pork with Cajun seasoning (commonly salt, pepper, mustard seed, cayenne, coriander, dill seed and allspice). In a large, heavy-bottomed pot, heat oil, stir in seasoned pork and cook over medium heat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add smoked sausage and cook for an additional five minutes. Stir in onion, bell pepper, celery, garlic and cook for five minutes.
Stir in roux and water, cover and cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in rice and cook for two minutes. Add the beef broth, bay leaves and Tabasco.
Bring to the boil, cover pot, and turn heat as low as it will go and cook for 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes. The rice should just start to open up. Stir in green onions and parsley and serve.
This recipe can be adjusted to make shrimp and crab jambalaya. Begin at the stirring-in stage with the onion and bell pepper, this time adding diced tomatoes and thyme as well. Use prawn stock instead of beef stock, and then stir in cooked prawns and lump crabmeat with 10 minutes' cooking time left.