The Urdu poet Javed Akhtar once compared spices in food to foul language and cuss words in stand-up comedy. A good comedian, he said, shouldn't need profanity to make a joke funny. The same goes for food, if you cook food with enough flavour, you don't need spices. But if your food is bland, you need to give it some energy.
If you know me, you know my cooking definitely needs some energy. Over the last few years, I've experimented with different hot sauces and have slowly become a big fan.
But I'm more interested in eating hot sauces than in cooking with them. So, while I could share some recipes, I think you'll find something else about these hot sauces much more interesting: their names.
1. Tabasco sauce
This sauce is named after the Tabasco pepper, one of its main ingredients. The chilli is associated with Tabasco, a state in southern Mexico.
With a name as Mexican as this, I was surprised to learn that Tabasco sauce is actually a completely American product, with no connection to Mexico. The origins of the name are uncertain, although one theory is that Tabasco could mean something like "land where the ground is moist."
Needless to say, make sure you have a big glass of water next to you if you're planning on using a lot of this sauce.
2. Cholula hot sauce
This hot sauce is American-owned but produced in the Mexican state of Jalisco. However, it's named after Cholula, a Mexican city more than 500 kilometres away.
I don't know why they did that, but what I do know is that Cholula is on my bucket list. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in North America and was once an important religious centre in the Aztec world.
It was also the site of the infamous Cholula massacre in 1519, when Spanish conquistadors and their allies slaughtered thousands of unarmed Cholulan civilians.
Today, Cholula is a vibrant city with beautiful Mesoamerican ruins and colonial churches. It has layers of Mexican history piled one on top of another. I suppose that's what I like about the sauce too, it is bright, complex, and has more going on beneath the surface than you might expect.
3. Tapatío hot sauce
Like the other two, Tapatío is an American brand with a Mexican name. Unlike them, however, Tapatío isn't the name of a place. It's a nickname for people from Guadalajara.
The term comes from the Indigenous word tlapatiotl, which may have referred to the worth or price of an item, possibly in the context of barter. One theory is that it became associated with merchants from Guadalajara and eventually with people from the city more generally.
What you can be sure of, however, is that Tapatío hot sauce is definitely worth its price!
4. Frank's RedHot sauce
I first came across this sauce when Taco Bell introduced a limited-edition Frank's RedHot menu.
I don't need to tell you anything about this name. It was made by someone called Frank, it's red, and it's hot!
It's funny how much history can hide on something as mundane as a bottle of hot sauce. Now, whenever I reach for one, I have a little history to think about along with the heat, and a less bland dinner.
Let me know what your favourite sauces are. I'd love to try them!