From beer and beef jerky to donuts and everything at Pizza Hut, sriracha has become a culinary mainstay of America. The story of how the hot sauce came to the country is also one of immigration. One of the earliest records of sriracha dates back to 1949, when a woman in Thailand made a chili sauce using chili peppers, vinegar, sugar, salt, and garlic. She named it after the small seaside town she lived in, Si Racha. But sriracha in its most ubiquitous form — a plastic bottle filled with chili sauce and topped with a green cap — was...
