Worcestershire sauce is a condiment that’s used to flavor many food recipes like Welsh rarebit, Caesar salad, and Oysters Kirkpatrick, and some alcoholic drinks such as Bloody Marys.
Worcestershire sauce has its roots in India, but was actually created by accident in its namesake town of Worcester, England in 1835. As the story goes, Lord Marcus Sandy had returned home to England to retire after successfully governing Bengal, India for many years. He so missed his favorite Indian sauce that he commissioned drug store owners John Lea and William Perrins to come up with a reasonable facsimile.Â
The original intent of the chemists was to keep some of the batch to sell in the store, but the fish and vegetable mixture had such a strong odor that they decided otherwise and stored it in the cellar. It lay forgotten for two years, until it was rediscovered during a clean-up mission. The batch had aged into a wonderfully flavored sauce which was bottled and quickly became popular.
Lea and Perrins successfully branched out by convincing stewards on British passenger ships to include it on their dining table set-ups. It soon became a British staple, primarily as a steak sauce, and further emigrated worldwide. The guarded recipe basically remains the same. However, the advertising no longer purports to “make your hair grow beautiful.”
It’s said the original recipe for Worcestershire sauce contained vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, molasses, tamarind, shallots, anchovies, ginger, chili, cloves, nutmeg and cardamom. The current ingredients in a bottle of Lea & Perrins Original Worcestershire sauce are distilled white vinegar, molasses, water, sugar, onions, anchovies, salt, garlic, cloves, tamarind extract, natural flavorings and chili pepper extract. It takes one to two years for Worcestershire sauce to ferment. There are other brands on the market, but two common ingredients are anchovies and tamarind.
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