A Pepper, a People, and the Oldest City

Saint Augustine was founded by the Spanish in 1565, which makes it the oldest continuously settled European city in the United States. The story of the datil pepper begins two centuries later. In 1768, a physician named Dr. Andrew Turnbull brought some fourteen hundred colonists from Minorca, Greece, and Corsica to grow indigo at New Smyrna, about seventy miles down the coast. Turnbull promised them land of their own. What they got instead was nine years of forced labor and cruelty so severe that by 1776 fewer than six hundred of them remained.

That year the colonists found a champion in the attorney general of the province, who took up proceedings on their behalf and freed them from their contracts. The survivors made their way north to Saint Augustine in 1777 and settled the northern part of the city, a district they built up themselves and that came to be known as the Minorcan Quarter. When the historian George Fairbanks wrote his history of the city in 1858, he observed that their descendants formed "the larger portion of the population of the place." Many of those families are still here. So are their recipes.

Where the datil pepper enters the story is, in truth, a matter of friendly dispute. Tradition holds that the Minorcans carried it with them, though the early histories never mention it, and some trace its arrival through Cuba in the later 1800s. Either way, the datil found a permanent home in Minorcan kitchens and nearly nowhere else, flavoring the chowders, pilaus, and pepper sauces that define Old City cooking to this day.

Old City Pepper Company represents the final distillation of a generations old recipe, unearthed and reinvented for modern palettes. Our sauce, mustard, and jelly come from a family recipe handed down for generations, made with datil peppers grown right here in Saint Augustine. It’s time to Taste the Datil Difference!