54/90, hot sauce

I'm not quite sure when hot sauce made it onto every table in America. This is not a condiment I remember from my childhood.

There was a time, approximately eighth grade (roughly 2001), when my friends became fascinated with 25 cent wing nights. I didn't go with them, wasn't allowed to go with a group of minors to a place that was part-sports bar. I didn't even really understand what "B Dubs" was until about my junior year.

I'm sitting in a French-inspired bistro, eating a homemade English muffin, debating whether or not to put hot sauce on my eggs. I realize that in my home, this was never a question. We didn't have hot sauce. We didn't eat spicy food, really, outside of my Mexican dinner requests.

I thought this was the norm. Hot sauce was a Tex-Mex thing. It was a sports bar thing, but a small thing. A thing easily forgotten when a waitress offered you ketchup instead. I didn't know that it was on par with Ranch dressing, the condiment of choice for 50 percent of Americans.

Now I'm confused by this. What did Buffalo Wild Wings do to get this wing craze going? Was there a hole in my childhood that just allowed me to miss the hot sauce on tables for so many years? Where was I when this was happening?

I never expected to be a hot-sauce-egg person. I never expected to move beyond hatred for the sticky bottle with its peeling label that has now made its way to every restaurant table. So this morning, when I thought about shaking this runny, red sauce onto my perfectly scrambled eggs, I resisted. Like so many things, I pushed the popular thing away and refused to eat my eggs like so many others. Not until I understand how it got onto my table without my noticing.