Worcestershire sauce

Worcestershire sauce (/ˈwʊstə/ (listen) WUUS-tə(r), /ˈwʊstəʃə/ WUUS-tə-shə(r) /ˈsɔːs/ sawce) is a fermented liquid condiment created in the city of Worcester in Worcestershire, England, in the first half of the 19th century. The creators were the chemists John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins, who went on to form the company Lea & Perrins. Worcestershire sauce has been considered a generic term since 1876, when the English High Court of Justice ruled that Lea & Perrins did not own the trademark to 'Worcestershire'. Worcestershire sauce is frequently used to enhance food and drink recipes, including Welsh rarebit, Caesar salad, Oysters Kirkpatrick, and deviled eggs. As both a background flavour and a source of umami (the meaty fifth flavour), it is now added also to dishes that historically did not contain it, such as chili con carne and beef stew. It is also used directly as a condiment on steaks, hamburgers, and other finished dishes, and to flavour cocktails such as the Bloody Mary and Caesar. A fermented fish sauce called garum was a staple of Greco-Roman cuisine and of the Mediterranean economy of the Roman Empire, as the first-century encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder writes in his Historia Naturalis and the fourth/fifth-century Roman culinary text Apicius includes garum in its recipes. The use of similar fermented anchovy sauces in Europe can be traced back to the 17th century. The Lea & Perrins brand was commercialised in 1837 and was the first type of sauce to bear the Worcestershire name. The origin of the Lea & Perrins recipe is unclear. The packaging originally stated that the sauce came 'from the recipe of a nobleman in the county'. The company has also claimed that 'Lord Marcus Sandys, ex-Governor of Bengal' encountered it while in India with the East India Company in the 1830s, and commissioned the local apothecaries to recreate it. According to company tradition, when the recipe was first mixed there the resulting product was so strong that it was considered inedible and the barrel was abandoned in the basement. Looking to make space in the storage area a few years later, the chemists decided to try it again, and discovered that the long fermented sauce had mellowed and was now palatable. In 1838 the first bottles of 'Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce' were released to the general public. In 2009, Lea & Perrins accountant Brian Keogh found notes from the 1800s dumped in a skip. The documents were to be placed on display at the Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum.