Ranking The Five Best Things About North Carolina: #4 Texas Pete
****With Rough N Rowdy returning to North Carolina this Friday, this week I’m counting down the best five things about the Tar Heel state. Yesterday the mountains came in at #5. Today we move onto #4.****
#4: TEXAS PETE HOT SAUCE
I mean hot sauce is hot sauce. Everyone likes hot sauce. That is, unless you are skinny fat vegan who won’t watch HBO’s Euphoria because it makes you “feel weird.” I don’t want people like that to read this. The following exposé is intended exclusively for hot sauce eaters unless there is a real medical issue documented by a certified professional. For those people I still want you to click off but technically you can still read this.
Hot sauce is everything to me. Not only the best And-1 Mixtape hooper of all time, hot sauce is also inspirational in its own right. With all the recent research surfacing about the vast benefits of sitting in a sauna / heat shock proteins etc. you have to believe we are staring down the barrel in maybe five years of scientific proof that hot sauce has incredible health benefits. Of course people like to bad mouth it and say it isn’t healthy for your stomach lining and can be problematic for people with irritable bowels, but for those people I would recommend you go ahead and go vegan. And once you do, pour some hot sauce on your vegetables so that you can actually still have some semblance of flavor in your life. Although it might be true that there are some foods that taste better without hot sauce, it also might be true that Jeremy Piven is a real person outside of his role as “Ari” on Entourage but there are some things I prefer not to think about.
Also, this is kind of a sidebar (one that I almost avoided because I don’t want to be gross) but hot sauce causes an erection inside of my taste buds. It gives my olfactory senses a rock hard boner. Even thinking about it right now is making it happen. As you read this I am quickly raising the Boner Flag to full mast inside my flavor feelers. And it’s at the top. Anyway, when it comes to all the hot sauces in the whole world, there are only a few that matter. And out of those, there is only one that makes sense with every dish even if its soup. That my friends, is Texas Pete.
Obviously, the first thing we’ve gotta clear up about Texas Pete is the name. When you first hear “Texas Pete,” you think of a recipe inspired by a dusty oasis in Midland, Texas. You think of an honest cowboy named Pete—an old timer with three children and the resolve of a quarter horse. You think of his oldest daughter who created the first “Texas Pete” recipe in memory of her father (Pete) who eventually passed away of natural causes (alcoholism). You think of the moment she sold the first bottle of her homemade recipe to her next door neighbor right there outside of Dallas. You can literally feel the pride and sadness that she felt that day. And ultimately when you hear “Texas Pete,” you think of Ol’ Bo—the wrinkly and racist oil tycoon who discovered the sauce only months later and litigated it away her, taking Texas Pete and making it into the hot sauce empire that it is today. When you hear the name “Texas Pete,” of course you think these things. You have a brain! But, as history would have it, you’re wrong.
The truth is that Texas Pete Hot Sauce was born and raised in my home state of North Carolina. However, as proud as us North Carolinians are of it, it would be misleading to imply that this hot sauce was created in the style of our state: missionary. No, Texas Pete is actually what the professionals call “Louisiana style.”
The origin story of how a Louisiana-style hot sauce made in Winston-Salem went on to be called “Texas Pete” is truly a mystery to me. However, I’ve always had a suspicion that the story goes a little something like this…
In the early 1900s, a vigorous but quiet creole man was forced by a criminal past to make a late-life move from the Louisiana bayou to the east coast. When he arrived in North Carolina, he was alone and had nothing. He got a lowly kitchen job at the only restaurant that didn’t ask for documentation, and he learned to meal prep to get by. After a few weeks of going virtually unnoticed, a gregarious and dimwitted line cook named Greg walked over to him during a break to engage him in conversation. It didn’t get very far but Greg still managed, in a try at camaraderie, to give him the nicknamed of “Texas Pete.” Greg was acknowledging that this quiet man was from somewhere else, but as Greg himself had never been out of the Tar Heel state, he had no idea where that somewhere else could be. Texas Pete it was.
Over the course of the next few months, the two men formed an unique bond over the arduous job they shared. Although the conversations were mostly one sided, both men knew that they had a friend in the other. Then one fateful evening in the fall when the rest of the kitchen had already left for home, Greg noticed Texas Pete dipping a leftover chicken breast into some type of oily red homemade concoction. Time and time again, Texas Pete would take two dips from his creole creation and then take a big bite. In a display of kindness and a little bit of nosiness, Greg asked Texas Pete if he could try the dip for himself. “Fine,” he said. The moment the sauce touched Greg’s tongue he knew his life would never be the same.
Using the local library as a resource, the two teamed up to learn the ins-and-outs of large scale distribution at a record pace. With hustle and painstaking attention to detail, they found the perfectly shaped bottle, formed an ironclad plan for production, and were ultimately left with only one question. What to call it?
Texas Pete suggested they go with “Not Guilty” but Greg shut it down by saying “haha what the fuck dude?” Greg then insisted that they use something that meant more to them personally. Then, in a moment of clarity, it came to him. They would call the sauce “Texas Pete.” Texas Pete had created it after all!
However, Texas Pete was a peculiar man who—for all Greg knew—could have been “not guilty” back home for anything from armed robbery to public urination (repeat offender). At the first suggestion they name the sauce after him, Texas Pete refused. Initially Greg thought he was just being humble, but after days and days of back and forth, it finally clicked in his head that his partner did not want to do it, not because of humility, but because his name was not actually “Texas Pete.” Greg had to practically force it out of him, but finally Texas Pete revealed that if they were to name it after him, he wanted to honor his own true name—a name he shared his own father—Jean Chouteau. As soon as he heard it, Greg knew that the French connotation wouldn’t work in prime American markets. He pleaded to just stick with Texas Pete. This lack of respect for where he came from absolutely enraged Jean Chouteau, and in a furious outburst he told Greg not to say one more word because he was actually a mass murderer on the lamb and wouldn’t mind adding one more name to his long list. Quickly, almost as a reflex, Greg grabbed the closest cutting knife and sliced the aorta artery in Jean Chouteau’s throat with one smooth stroke. At that time in history it was pretty much okay to kill someone if they said they were going to kill you first. Honestly, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted as long as nobody was around. No phones or cameras or anything like that. What can I say it was a different time.
Anyway the rest of the story is history. Greg goes on to develop the sauce. Calls it Texas Pete as originally planned. Gets it all the way to the final stages of the process. Out of nowhere this oil tycoon named Ol’ Bo comes in a litigates it away from him on a claim that the branding used his likeness. The first official bottle was sold in Winston-Salem in 1929 and Ol’ Bo made so much damn money he founded Wake Forest just to be funny.
I can’t wait to be back in North Carolina.
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