Hot sauce and jungle

Avery island, about 15 mi. away from New Iberia, is a fantastic place to visit for two reasons: The Tabasco factory and the Jungle Gardens. Since 1868 the McIlhenny family is producing their famous pepper sauce on the island, which in reality is a massive salt dome. Not too long ago the company modernized their museum and that was the main reason we came to revisit.


Now it's arranged as a route with several stops: exhibits, artifacts, videos and, for the first time, they also let you glimpse into the the production and bottling line, the barrel storage and the greenhouse. The big barrels on the picture, covered with salt, contain the pepper mash, which has to age before it can be blended to become a sauce. Most of the peppers they use nowadays come from Southern America.


Under the Avery/McIlhenny family's management, Avery Island has remained a natural paradise. Jungle Gardens are adjacent to the pepper sauce factory (of course, with a store and restaurant) and this semitropical botanical garden is well worth the visit. It's a drive-thru, passing huge live oaks lushly covered with Spanish moss, bayous and swamps with gators and turtles and birds and, also, many rare, exotic plants, azaleas, Japanese camellias, Egyptian papyrus, bamboo etc. The island is especially famous for its bird colony. The owner E. A. McIlhenny founded this in the 1890s after hunters slaughtered the snowy egrets by the thousands for feathers to make ladies’ hats. Now they are living protected on a rookery.


Well fitting with the hot sauce, which comes in much more varieties than what we know in Germany, we bought Konriko rice from New Iberia's Conrad Rice Mill, one of the oldest operating rice mills in the country. They also offer tours and besides rice they sell a lot of spices and sauces of their own brand.

In the evening we were invited to a restaurant in St. Martinville, a town closely connected to the immigration of the Acadians from Canada (the later "Cajuns") and Evangeline, a character immortalized by the author Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. There we got our share of seafood (and aligator) in good company. The friends of Dave & Chris we met, are "real cajuns" and it took us a little to understand their mix of English and Old French. It's been a pleasant evening and we enjoyed sitting outside on the patio afterwards, watching the lizards, till it got dark.