On Nevis, pepper sauce is on every table. Locals do not call it hot sauce.
It turns up on roti counters, beside the roadside grills, and in home kitchens where the bottle tends to carry one woman's first name and a recipe that appears on no one else's. Saveur's Adina Steiman traced the spread of it in 2018: Llewellyn is the big name in town, with a printed label and a reputation that crossed water; the plastic bottles in home kitchens carry the most heat and the most fruit.
Jennifer Weekes makes one of them.
Her main work, to the degree she is still working, is a boutique. She also does batik weaving, seamstress work, and preaching. The ladies are looking for a little finance at home, she told Saveur. The pepper sauce is the finance.
She uses West Indian hot peppers, onion, garlic, white vinegar, salt, and a little turbinado sugar. Then chunks of ripe pineapple, a dash of mustard powder, whole cloves. She purées it and simmers it long enough to mellow the heat and bring the fruit forward.
The bottle has Jennifer's name on it. The label is plastic. The sauce is orange, almost pumpkin, with seeds and threads of pulp settled at the bottom of the jar. Open it and the smell comes fruit first, then a slow pepper underneath, the pineapple still readable hours after lunch.
This is one kitchen. There are others. A red-bottle sauce somebody's aunt makes for Sunday cookouts and sells by the half-dozen from a cooler at the Pinney's car park, never the same twice. A thinner amber one a grandmother used to post to her daughter in Brooklyn until her hands could no longer keep up. Recipes that travel with a maker and stop when she does.
Llewellyn's three sauces are the version of Nevis pepper sauce that crosses oceans. The first names on the home-kitchen bottles are the version that stays. Both belong to the same island.
Shop this story: Llewellyn's Hot Pepper and Thyme Sauce · Mrs Greaux Pepper Sauce
Read on: Three sauces from Rawlins Village →
Or step back: How Nevis makes pepper sauce →