McIlhenny's Gold: How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco Empire

by Jeffrey Rothfeder

Book Overview

The story of the powerful McIlhennys of Louisiana, who turned hot peppers into a Tabasco fortune After the Civil War ended, Edmund McIlhenny, an ambitious and tenacious Louisiana businessman, found himself with few prospects. The South's economy in ruins and his millions of dollars in Confederacy currency worthless, he had no choice but to return with his wife, Mary, to her family home in Avery Island, a former sugar plantation destroyed by Union...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060721847
• ISBN13: 9780060721848
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Harper Business
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.11 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Good comprehensive history

I enjoyed the book and felt like I got a comprehensive history of the McIlhenny family and how they kept the company going. At some points the book was a bit slow but overall I enjoyed it and glad I read it. As a lover of tabasco sauce, it is a must read although I am not very impressed with the Mcilhenny family based on the facts noted in the book

Great book on GREAT company NOT written by an insider

I loved this book and how it gave us the inside story on a real American success story. I do not personally like the sauce the company makes but I am fascinated with its history. The author pulls no punches and seems to have enjoyed access to many former employees and historical documents. I trust Business Week (where Rothfelder works) and this book doesn't disappoint. I especially liked the chapters dealing with "current" company exploits and how they are reacting. And not reacting! Good, fast read. You won't want to put it down. McIlhenny's Gold: How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco Empire

Interesting Read

Growing up 2 miles from Avery Island I never knew how famous the area was. Once I grew older and learned the importance of the area, I became very appreciative of the land, and what is produced at the island. I thought this book was very interesting. I know a lot of things about the island but not the old history of the island, and that's what I found to be so interesting. To learn how Edmund invented the sauce, and learning about the different chairman's of the company. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Avery Island and the famous Tabasco sauce.

Hot sauce meets Faulkner

Jeff Rothfeder's McIlhenney's Gold portrays the great American success story, yet with a lot of twists and turns only doing business off a small Louisiana island could produce. He begins at the beginning, with the McIlhenney's first bottle of sauce shortly after the Civil War, and brings the reader up to the present day when, it seems, the family, through its own paranoia and suspicion of outsiders, struggles to keep up with demand while fighting off stiff competition. The book is fairly written, yet with colorful enough characters and details, at times, to feel like you're reading a southern novel. I highly recommend the book, whether or not you drip Tabasco on your scrambled eggs.

One Man's Dream

Never again will I be able to pick up that little bottle of Tabasco sauce and sprinkle a few drops on whatever I am eating, something I have done several times a week for a few decades now , without thinking of the amazing set of circumstances that came together to put that distinctive little bottle on my table. Sometimes the little diamond-shaped label on the front of the bottle, the one that still mentions Avery Island as being its home, would catch my eye and make me wonder how such a unique product could have been born in such an isolated place and how it managed to survive long enough to become a product recognized around the world. Jeffrey Rothfeder's new book, McIlhenny's Gold, provides the answers to all of my questions. Rothfeder tells the story of a remarkable family, one that literally rose from the ashes of the Civil War to create a hugely successful business based on the sale of a single food product, a business that is still well known some 140 years later. In his research of the McIlhenny family, Rothfeder found that much of what has come to be accepted about the family's history and the origin of Tabasco sauce is simply untrue. So many myths surround the family and its product, in fact, that even family members have found it difficult to separate fact from fiction. When Edmund McIlhenny, fifty years old at the end of the Civil War, and prior to the war a successful New Orleans banker, returned to Louisiana in 1865 he found that the Avery family he had married into was largely destitute. The family's rich sugar cane plantation was no more and the only thing of value still in family hands was Petit Anse, the little island that was later to be renamed Avery Island. Edmund McIlhenny was a businessman, not a farmer. As a pre-war banker, he learned to market himself personally to such a degree that he became the best known and most sought after financial man in New Orleans. His marketing skills, and his willingness to bend the truth when it made for a better story, have made it difficult to determine exactly when he became aware of the chili pepper from Mexico's Tabasco region and how he decided to make hot sauce the new family business. What is clear, however, is that he made the right decision and that he created a business that has served his family well for four generations. The McIlhenny product has been a high quality one from the beginning. The three-year chili paste aging process and the inability to use mechanized pickers to gather the delicate chili peppers requires that manufacturing costs, especially labor costs, be controlled as tightly as possible. That concern led to the near recreation of the plantation system on Avery Island, a company town so complete with free shelter, medical care, schools and churches that white employees had little reason to ever leave little Avery Island. McIlhenny Co. workers, almost guaranteed a job for life, became extremely loyal to the company that provided them with eve