Hot Sauce Nation

October 15, 2016
America's lust for hot sauces, which used to be a regional habit, has gone nationwide, and just about every community seems to have its own homegrown hot sauce. Connoisseurs debate these fiery liquids' relative merits and argue the superiority of one bottle's provenance over another's. Nicks surveys the plethora of native hot sauces from national brands, such as Tabasco, to small-batch ones available in the smallest markets. There being no substitute for personal experience, Nicks traveled the breadth of the nation to taste dozens of hot sauces for himself. He lays to rest calumnies against hot sauces, noting that they're not corrosive as some claim. Their searing heat in the alimentary track is in fact an illusion created by capsaicin, the active principle. Nicks relates some of the success of those now ubiquitous plastic squeeze bottles of Vietnamese sriracha as well as the very Middle American taste for Buffalo chicken wings.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)