Kitchen's Got A Squeeze Box

OK, admittedly, my obsession with different sauces in my soul food kitchen has gotten just a tad out of hand. Among the current inventory: Green Chili (super hot), Chipotle in Adobo sauce (very spicy), Mango/Habanero (fruity to spicy), tamarind/lime/chipotle (tangy to spicy), Chow-Chow sauce (Sumac based), Mole (chololatey). And that’s just a random sample. I actually went to my local kitchen supply place today to buy a few more squeeze bottles — one of the few concessions to plastic in our kitchen (the others include saran wrap and the bags I use for sous vide cooking).

I tried to do a bit of historical digging regarding the origin of squeeze bottles. The best I could do was trace it back to 1946 and a product called “Stopette,” an underarm spray deodorant applied by squeezing a plastic bottle and developed by Dr. Jules Montenier (I don’t have the creativity to make this shit up, I promise.). I kinda like the lineage: from underarm deodorant to condiment dispenser. There’s a logic there somewhere if we wanted to unpack it. I don’t.

My interest here is more about unpacking the things and smells and tastes that have become part of our everday life experiences without our thinking much about them. It’s an essential part of the journey of soul food, in my opinion, the odyssey largely about slowly opening up the baggage we have carried around with us most of our lives and (re)discovering what had long been bottled up.