Worcestershire Sauce

Worcestershire Sauce is a commercially-made seasoning sauce. There are different brands which will use different ingredients; some of the ingredients commonly used often include cloves, garlic, tamarind, paprika or chiles, soy sauce, treacle and/or molasses, vinegar (or lemon juice), salt, onions, garlic, anchovies, shallots, malt vinegar, and tamarind.

Though many other companies now make Worcestershire Sauce other than Lea & Perrins (such as French's and Heinz), those who like Lea & Perrins will turn up their noses at the others. Lea & Perrins will barrel and age theirs for 3 years, and not all the other brands will do that.

Cooking Tips
Very useful in quick recipes where the flavours don't have time to marry and develop a body of their own.

Substitutes
There are recipes floating around out there for making your own Worcestershire sauce which have you "brew" it in the refrigerator before straining and using, but since you could more quickly walk to the corner shop, that hardly seems in the nature of a substitution, which has more to do with what do you have to hand right now. Some people suggest substituting soy sauce, but that would change the nature of the taste too much. Given that Worcestershire sauce lasts indefinitely in the bottle and that a bottle costs so little, there's no reason not to keep a small bottle around as part of your staples.

Storage
A bottle of store-bought Worcestershire sauce does not require refrigeration after opening,. Some people, feel, however, that refrigerating it may extend its shelf life beyond that posted on the bottle for those who only use it infrequently.

History
John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins were born within a few years of each other in the early 1790s. Both became chemists, and partnered on opening a few chemist shops (pharmacies) together starting in 1823 in Worcester, in the shire of Worcestershire in England. How exactly two pharmacists decided to go into the food sauce business is unclear, but one version with lots of promising details (such as names and dates) goes that in 1835 a fellow named Marcus, Lord Sandys, had returned from India, where he had been governor of Bengal. He had a recipe for a brewed sauce that he asked his local chemists (who happened to be Lea & Perrins) to have a go at making. They brewed it up, found it tasted awful, put the cask of it in the cellar, and got back to their regular jobs. A year later, on a lark before finally clearing the cask out of their basement, they had a taste of it. It had aged into a really tasty sauce. So tasty, that they paid Lord Sandys for the recipe, and were bottling and selling it out of their stores by the following year, 1837.

By 1839, they were exporting it to America. The sauce has held a Royal Warrant since 1904. The Lea & Perrins company was sold to the HP company (which makes HP brown sauce) in 1930. And no doubt to this day, descendants of Lord Sandys rue their ancestor's sale of the recipe!

The recipe's ingredients are a closely-guarded secret, known only to those who manage the company and to those who trouble to read the list of ingredients on the side of the jar.

The British weren't the first, though, to make such commercially-prepared sauces a staple in their kitchens. The Romans did it before them, with their liquamen and garum sauces.

Language Notes
Worcestershire is pronounced "wus - tuh - sher". Pronounce the "wus" part as you would "puss", except with the "w" at the front.

The correct spelling is "Worcestershire", not "Worchestershire", with a "h".

Also called: Worcestershiresauce (German) Salsa inglesa (Spanish)