A drop of ghost pepper with your clam chowder? A new Cambridge hot sauce festival will bring the heat

Under the Radar Podcast

America loves hot sauce. A 2021 Instacart survey found 74% of consumers eat hot sauce with their food, and when there was a shortage of the popular Huy Fong Foods' sriracha hot sauce last year, one bottle would go for as much as $52 on Amazon. Right now, they go for $9.

But given Greater Boston’s reputation for cuisine that is the opposite of spicy (clam chowda, anyone?) you might be surprised that Massachusetts has a long history with hot sauce — the first bottled cayenne sauces appeared here in 1807.

“There is a really, really long history of use of hot and spicy foods in the Americas,” Megan Elias, director of the food studies programs at Boston University, told Under the Radar. “The capsicum comes from the Americas. And it was, then exported out to Europe and to the rest of the world, really crucially. So it ends up in South Asia and ends up in Africa, getting kind of involved ... in the foods there. And then, eventually kind of comes back to the U.S.”

The hot sauce market in the U.S. is projected to grow from about $3 billion in 2023 to more than $5 billion by 2030, and there will be plenty of spicy food for local fans to sample at the upcoming, inaugural Rhythm N' Spice festival in Cambridge on Saturday, May 4. It reflects the area's growing desire for spicy flavors, says Nicola Williams, producer of the festival. She plans to highlight the culinary diversity that exists in Greater Boston.

“We have a spicy Jamaican vegetarian and beef patty challenge. We have a spicy pizza challenge with a local, Black-owned restaurant right here in Cambridge. We have, wings. And we're going to have three categories of flavors, from African sauces, to jerk, to hot sauce from all over the world,” she said. “And so we want to make sure that we infuse all of this spice throughout the event. We also have dance so you can shake it off after you've blown your mouth or palates.”

GUESTS

Nicola Williams, producer of the Rhythm N' Spice Hot Sauce Fest, president of The Williams Agency

Brian Ruhlmann, founder and owner of Craic Sauce in Lowell, Massachusetts

Megan Elias, director of the food studies programs at Boston University