Twin Attorneys Team Up on a New Kind of Case

Keeping Their Grandmother’s Legacy Alive.

Alice and Alicia Crowe are identical twin lawyers turned sauce-entrepreneurs.

The two sisters are now working on a different type of case, bottling and selling Emmaline’s All-Natural Hot Sauce, a family-owned line of hot sauce that is three generations old and is made from their grandmother’s original recipe. As proud graduates of Howard University School of Law, the two have been working together for 20 years as attorneys in their own practice handling legal cases, but now they are teaming up to keep their family legacy alive.

“If you love good home-style cooking, then you know you’ve got to have this sauce. A thick, rich, smooth well-seasoned peppery flavor that leaves just enough kick on your tongue to spark your joy!

“The sauce was Emmaline’s dream. So, we named it in her honor. It’s one of her original recipes. The photo on the bottle is Emmaline’s wedding photo in 1910. This past year we’ve had tough challenges, lots of pain and loss. When we were in quarantine and taking care of our mother, we promised her we would not let her dream die,” says Alice.

The twin’s mother, Gwendolyn Stinson Crowe, taught them how to make the sauce from an original recipe of her mother, Emmaline. In 2007, Emmaline’s Hot Sauce won the Whole Foods Local Hero Award. Gwendolyn, who learned how to cook from her mother, Emmaline Humphries Stinson, passed away last year during the pandemic.

The History

“Food is a part of our rich cultural heritage and our African tradition. We spent Sunday evenings around the table with great food and spirited discussions. We must keep that alive,” says Alicia.

Emmaline ran a successful catering business in Dothan, Alabama. She learned the trade from her mother, Pauline Stinson, who owned a restaurant on Claxton Street in the town of Elba. The restaurant served the Elba County jail, jurors, visitors to Courthouse Square, and Elba’s “colored” residents at the Emancipation Day Celebrations on May 28, 1907, and 1923. When the Pea River flooded and engulfed Elba, Ms. Emmaline cooked food to help flood victims.

Emmaline’s Specialty, Inc. donates a portion of all sales to charity. One charity they support is the Black Land Trust, because their great-grandmother, Pauline Stinson, once owned 100 acres of land in Elba, Alabama, by 1900, during the post-Civil War period when formerly enslaved people amassed 14 million acres of land. Like so many other Black families in America, after the turn of the century, 90% of that land was lost and wrangled away from Black ownership to white ownership, thus creating the wealth gap that exists today.

The Stinson House, a property owned by Pauline & Martin Stinson, was recently designated an Alabama Historic Landmark. The African American Stinson family owned the home for 102 years, which more recently housed the Elba Alabama Chamber of Commerce. Tragically, however, the Stinson House was destroyed by fire just before midnight on July 12, 2021.

“Our Grandmother Emmaline once lived in the Stinson House. When we found out that the house was destroyed by fire, we knew we couldn’t let critical history disappear into the ashes,” says Alice. Hence Emmaline’s Specialty corporation, its Emmaline’s All-Natural Hot Sauce, and the family company’s support of the Black Land Trust.

For more information about the sauce, call (877) 700-6736, contact Alice Crowe-Bell at (914) 319-5163, or visit EmmalinesHotSauce.com.