Hot Sauce and Colonial Degeneracy

Abstract The Comte de Buffon, the eighteenth-century French naturalist, theorized that European Creoles were subjected to the influences of the local landscape and terroir through the foods they consumed. Those foods that were closely associated with either “African-ness” or the New World, including sauces, were thought to carry the influences of those places and to create an alteration in the behavior of the European individual. Hot and spicy foods, typified by hot sauces, were supposed to contribute to morally corrupt behaviors, such as promiscuity, violence, and inhospitableness. To mitigate those influences, colonial mothers were enjoined to avoid spicy foods, especially while breastfeeding, to refuse wet-nurses, and whenever possible to have their children raised in Europe. This chapter examines the role of food and sauces at the intersection of racial prejudice and Buffon’s theories of terroir-based colonial degeneracy in creating a tiered system of European belonging in Saint Domingue.