worcestershire sauce

Worcester, England, where the chemists John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins launched it in 1837; a sauce that resembles the umami sauces, some of them fermented, that reached England from Asia in the imperial era

Sold from Worcester from 1837, with a factory by 1845 and more than 30,000 bottles a year by 1855, by Lizzie Collingham's account; advertised almost from the start in the English-language newspapers of colonial India, the Bombay Times among them, and recommended for curries; now one of the two standard sauces on Japanese dining tables, as ustasosu beside soy sauce, and in many Cantonese kitchens a twin to the soy sauce bottle, a dip for spring rolls and prawn balls

Worcestershire sauce has an origin story that served its makers. The common account has Lord Sandys, back from governing Bengal, asking two Worcester chemists to recreate a sauce he had loved there, and a batch so fiery it made their eyes water left in the cellar until it matured; Davidson tells it another way, a barrel of spiced vinegar made to an Indian recipe for a customer who never collected it, fermenting in the cellar. The historian Julia Fine finds the story likely made up or embellished, company lore in one archaeologist's phrase: the advertisements of 1840 speak only of a nobleman, who is named as Sandys in the 1860s, and the scholarship rests on two thinly cited books, one commissioned by an owner of the firm. What she does find is a brand that leaned on an Indian heritage it never disputed, sold the sauce as good for curries, and named it not India sauce but Worcestershire, an English county on an exotic bottle. The brand's own page today names only two local chemists and the year 1837. India sat in this sauce as a story and never as a traced recipe: the brand leaned on it to sell, gave the bottle an English county's name, and now leaves India off its own page.