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| They say ignorance is bliss. I tend to disagree, but there are some things I feel like I was better off not knowing. Like the subject of this Epicurious article: The Murky, Salty Mystery of Worcestershire Sauce  The peppery sauce may be wildly popular, but its ingredient list and origin story are shrouded in secrecy. It's also one of those things where people who know how to pronounce it inevitably look down their noses with disdain on those who don't. Kind of like quinoa or pho. Culinarily ubiquitous and a perpetual tongue-twister, Worcestershire sauce is one of the great food enigmas of the past two centuries. Yeah, I know I just did a food article a couple of days ago. Random is random. Inky brown, sweet and salty, funky and fishy, peppery and piquant, the sauce’s exact ingredient list was kept secret ever since it was first sold in Worcester, England, in the mid-19th century. There are at least two reasons to keep a recipe secret: to protect the business of making it, or because if you revealed it, people would be disgusted. This might be a case of "both." Nowadays, an ingredient list is mandated on most edible items, but one can hide a lot of nastiness under the cover of "natural and/or artificial flavors." The mystery that originally shrouded Worcestershire sauce has continued to propel its popularity around the world. Is it really the mystery, though? Or is it that it simply tastes good and helps bring out other flavors in food? Or, ooh, I know: it was the marketing. In fact, I’m willing to bet you’ve got a bottle of the perennially popular stuff tucked into a corner of your kitchen cupboards at this very moment—perhaps purchased for a platter of deviled eggs, a weeknight meatloaf, or a classic Bloody Mary. It's in the fridge, but yeah. Also, classic Bloody Marys are lame. Yes, I put Worcestershire sauce in mine. But the base is V-8, not tomato juice or Bloody Mary mix, which is apparently tomato juice with a few grains of seasoning. The recipe for the original version, developed and sold by Lea & Perrins in the 1830s, remained a closely guarded secret until 2009, when the daughter of Brian Keough, a former Lea & Perrins accountant, disclosed that her father had purportedly discovered an ingredient list in a factory trash pile. That recipe called for water, cloves, salt, sugar, soy, fish sauce, vinegar, tamarind, and pickles, among other ingredients. It's the "among other ingredients" that still worries me. Incidentally, I don't believe the "found in a trash pile" story for one second. I could change my mind on that, but it smells like corporate myth-making to me. Incidentally, "fish sauce" has always confused me. Is it sauce that's made from fish, or is it sauce for fish? Or both? I think one is supposed to just know these things, like how we know that olive oil is made from olives, but baby oil is made for babies. But Worcestershire’s closest condiment cousin is probably garum, a fish sauce that was integral to the kitchens of antiquity. Made from the fermented and salted innards of oily fish like anchovies and mackerel, this umami-rich potion was used on its own as a table sauce and blended with other ingredients—such as wine, black pepper, honey—to create various dressings for meat, fish, and vegetables. This is why my answer to the perpetual ice-breaker question of "if you could travel to the past or the future, which would you choose?" is "neither, but we know the past was disgusting, so if I had to choose, it'd be the future." Anyway, the article goes into the sauce's history for a while, then: Many of these references, and countless others, were compiled by William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi in their History of Worcestershire Sauce from 2012. Aha! This is a book ad, after all! Now owned by Kraft Heinz, Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce still dominates American supermarket shelves—but just as in the mid-19th century, alternative versions proliferate. Of course a giant conglomerate produces it now. One wonders what cost-cutting measures they inevitably took to make Worcestershire sauce as bland and uniform as pretty much everything else is, these days. They probably kept the disgusting parts, though. Those tend to be cheap. |
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