I guess I didn’t really know who I was until I discovered chipotle-flavoured Tabasco®-brand hot sauce. You know what Tabasco® sauce is: it is the wire-red sauce in the apothecary’s bottle that kicks things up in a tangy, vinegar-y way, and if you ask me it is a very obvious chilli sauce but then it does the job and you know exactly, with Tabasco®-brand original sauce, you know exactly what you are going to get. Chipotle-flavoured Tabasco®-brand hot sauce is an entirely different beast: first, it is an extremely ugly brown, and if you don’t shake the bottle it is likely to go grainy and kind of gross, like a grey-brown rim of sauce pieces will stick to the bottle in a sort of tide: look past that. Flavour-wise it is at once hot and smokey and kind of barbeque-y and kind of not, and honest to god I can and do eat bowls of plain rice with just some of this sauce on, I could just eat toast with that and no butter, this stuff is nectar, when we say the gods drank ambrosia we envision a creamy sort of almond milk thing, white and innocent and full of mother’s milk-like charm, but actually ambrosia is here, on earth, available in small long-tipped bottles, and it is called chipotle-flavoured Tabasco®-brand hot sauce, and it is heaven.
So we all recognise now that chipotle-flavoured Tabasco®-brand hot sauce is the best commonly available table sauce on the market. We all recognise that. When I now bring it to people’s new houses and flats as a welcoming present, despite the retail price being very low, it is a very thoughtful and perhaps impossibly perfect present I am giving them. ‘Here,’ my gift says, for me. ‘I have bought you the gift of deep and delicious flavour. Cherish every drop of it.’
The point is how this sauce changed me, and the journey it took me on as it did. Because I thought I was a completed and finished human being, before chipotle-flavoured Tabasco®-brand hot sauce. The first time I tried this sauce was at Chipotle Mexican Grill, the burrito bar, and from the first taste of it I was altered as a human: I stole it, for a kick-off, the first time I’d stolen in my life, and continued to steal bottles from there because it was impossible to find in the wild. The sauce did not exist in shops, despite me checking every sauce aisle I ever walked down for three entire years, and yes I did think about bulk-ordering it online but the shipping cost was prohibitive, and so chipotle-flavoured Tabasco®-brand hot sauce became my white whale – apart from the bottles I continued to steal from Chipotle Mexican Grill, obviously, my stealing techniques getting more and more brazen and sophisticated as the years went on. I went on detours, to try and find this sauce. I took buses across the city to large supermarkets I thought would have it. Red bottle Tabasco® sauce? You can buy that anywhere. The weak, bad, green jalapeno version? Also commonly available. The deep brown super-heat Tabasco®? I know where to get it even though I don’t want it. But chipotle-flavour eluded me, drove me to the brink of madness, until: until I chanced upon eight bottles in the corner shop in Stoke Newington one day. I bought all eight. Direct quote, from the shopkeeper, as I bought eight bottles of chipotle-flavoured Tabasco®-brand sauce, exhibiting euphoria close to tears: ‘What the fuck, man. That’s so much sauce.’
And now, finally, years after discovery, it seems Tabasco® has the logistics in place or whatever enough so that enough shops, now, stock chipotle-flavoured Tabasco®-brand hot sauce in enough supply so I don’t have to bulk buy it when I stumble upon it, and so you can more or less find it now, if you want it, it is in a lot of supermarkets but not all, it is available but not widely so. I will take that, for now. For me that is a little victory. I no longer have to steal from Chipotle Mexican Grill. But then one day I realised that essentially my soul and chipotle-flavoured Tabasco®-brand hot sauce were palpably intertwined, and that’s when I had a bowl of rice and we had run out of sauce and I couldn’t find any nearby, and the rice and meal as a whole was disgusting, and I realised that maybe 80% of the meals at home I had cooked in the past 24 months had been chipotle-flavoured Tabasco®-brand hot sauce augmented, and that now I am broken, in a way, and cannot enjoy regular meals without it. Yes: I have small portable bottles of chipotle-flavoured Tabasco®-brand hot sauce that I now take everywhere with me. Yes: I have a back-up bottle of the sauce in my cupboard, and another back-up bottle of sauce behind that. I feel like I am among the top ten consumers of this sauce out of everyone currently alive.
Adulthood is a lot about realisation, and this sauce made me learn a lot about myself. It made me realise I am in a thrall to brands. Adulthood, I’ve found, is about finding the specific brands of the various things you like and then holding them close to you like glimmering fragments of gold that will never be snatched away, and if the packaging is changed or the brand is in any way discontinued then the grief of this is akin to losing a pet and you start a small but focussed letter-writing campaign. So: Aussie-brand Mega Shampoo, but not the conditioner. Sure For Men compressed antiperspirant (red edition). Adidas Original black-on-white tube socks. I have longer relationships with these brands than I’ve ever had with, like, a woman. Oral-B Pro Expert toothpaste and Calvin Klein size L trunks. Reebok Workout Lows, the perfect summer trainer. There is an argument, a strong one, that says brands soften and distort the raw deal at the centre of every capitalist exchange: that the temples they build around and in front of them, the projection of themselves as smooth-faced business empires, this false feeling of friendliness and trust: it masks the fact that you are paying them their costs plus a thick wedge of profit every time you buy something off them. I think adulthood is also about ignoring that fact if you find the right shampoo, if not conditioner. Chipotle-flavoured Tabasco®-brand hot sauce made me realise that: yes, everything is a lie, most particularly everything at the heart of any exchange of money. But I have spent a lifetime collecting my precious, precious brands, and if they discontinue them I riot. If Tabasco® stop making that hot sauce I’ll fucking kill.