Culinarily ubiquitous and a perpetual tongue-twister, Worcestershire sauce is one of the great food enigmas of the past two centuries. 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.
The mystery that originally shrouded Worcestershire sauce has continued to propel its popularity around the world. According to one research firm, the global Worcestershire market was valued atmore than $950 million in 2022. That figure may seem far-fetched until you examine just how much people love this perplexing condiment—touted as “the only good sauce” and “applicable to every variety of dish” in one 19th-century advertisem*nt—most likely without knowing what’s in it or how it’s made.
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 classicBloody Mary. Such is the long arm of Worcestershire.
What is Worcestershire sauce?
The recipe for the original version, developed and sold by Lea & Perrins in the 1830s, remained a closely guarded secretuntil 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.
With a kitchen-sink list like that, it’s difficult to neatly place Worcestershire sauce in any single category of condiment. 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. The 4th-century Roman cookery bookApiciusdescribes oxygarum, a mixture of garum and vinegar, which was used as a poaching liquid and seasoning, and which sounds an awful lot like a primeval Worcestershire sauce.
Worcester to Worcestershire
The actual story of Worcestershire sauce doesn’t begin until more than a millennium after the fall of Rome. In 1823, English chemists John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins decided to open a pharmacy on Broad Street in Worcester, near the River Severn. Chemists and druggists in those dayswere not regulated like apothecaries, and they sold all manner of goods—including medicines, toiletries, and food—which may explain why two pharmacists apparently thought it was reasonable to start fermenting fish sauce in the back of their shop. But they certainly did not start making Worcestershire sauce immediately: According to Lea & Perrins’ official company history, the first batch of Worcestershire sauce, having matured in casks for 18 months, wasn’t introduced to the world until 1837.
We don’t know exactly why or how Lea and Perrins decided to start making Worcestershire sauce; that story has been lost to time. But we do know that the sauce was practically an immediate hit—thanks in large part to Lea and Perrins’ aggressive and successful marketing strategy, which initially involved getting bottles of the sauceaboard British ocean liners for passengers to try with their meals.
