Those who received such gifts were so enthusiastic that McIlhenny resolved to bring his Tabasco sauce to market. That year, he planted a bumper crop of peppers. A year later, he sent 658 bottles of his sauce to grocers in New Orleans, where they sold for $1 apiece.

Sales increased each year, and by 1872 Tabasco was being distributed throughout the Northeast, each bottle adorned with a warning, “CAUTION: One or two drops are enough for a plate of soup, meat, oysters &c., &c.” But as the condiment’s popularity grew, comic tales of people mistaking Tabasco for ketchup and slathering it over their food began appearing in the pages of The New York Times. “B’jocks, though, I was thunderin’ nigh dead when I fust et that ketchup,” a seafaring New Englander exclaims in one such account, published in 1901. “Dreadful powerful stuff that is to put on victuals.”

By then Tabasco had begun to achieve international renown, thanks to the marketing efforts of Edmund’s enterprising sons John and Ned. Edmund McIlhenny had died 10 years before, never suspecting that Tabasco would be his enduring legacy. “He died thinking himself much more successful as an antebellum banker than as a sauce manufacturer,” observes the McIlhenny company historian Shane K. Bernard. “I don’t know that he thought he would be remembered for Tabasco sauce at all — or really for anything.”