Saturday, December 22, 2012

#18 LEA & PERRINS



Tis the season for work holiday parties. I found myself having a surprisingly good time at Adam’s this past Saturday night. I even won a door prize: a Bloody Mary kit, which consisted of V8 juice, a bottle of Absolut vodka, and tiny jars of condiments like horseradish, tobasco, and worcestershire sauce. When I opened it I tossed the bottle of generic worcestershire sauce into the back-shelf purgatory of our pantry and replaced it with my own bottle of Lea & Perrins. Get excited: this week at MCM* we’re focusing on this mysterious condiment in its original version. Lea & Perrins holds a Royal Warrant from Her Majesty the Queen as “Purveyors of Worcestershire Sauce.”

Let’s put aside the Bloody Marys for a second to start at square one. How do you pronounce ’worcestershire’? I always make the mistake of trying to pronounce all the syllables, thereby ending up with a mouthful that sounds like WUR-shest-er-shire. So common is this problem that Lea & Perrins’ website addresses it:
“Worcestershire can be properly pronounced a few ways: WUST-ter-shire, WOOS-ter- sheer, or WOOS-ter-sher sauce. But the easiest way to say Worcestershire Sauce is Lea & Perrins®.”

Well-played. For what it’s worth, I’ve decided my favorite way to say it is probably WOOS-ter-sher.
Lea & Perrins—like many of the older Royal Warrant holders I’ve come across in the past few months—has a really inspiring company story. The sauce was invented in the early 1800s in the English county of Worcester by two chemists, John Lea and William Perrins. They were intensely secretive about their ingredients. At first it was a complete disaster; the taste was terrible. The inventors ended up storing all of the sauce they made in large barrels in a cellar and forgetting about it. When they came across it a year and a half later, they decided to try it again and found it was delicious. What they had thought of as a failure was really just a sauce so complex it needed a little more time than normal to marinate. If only all business and creative failures could be solved by something as simple as time, right?

After the 1830s, Lea & Perrins took off, becoming a worldwide phenomenon. For a time it was the only commercially bottled condiment sold in the United States. It’s so versatile that the way it’s eaten today depends on the country in which you’re eating it. In the UK it’s popular on “cheese on toast”; in Hong Kong it’s used in salads; in the US and Canada it’s used to flavor hamburgers.
We’ve been putting Lea & Perrins on everything this week. I whipped up a batch of Chex mix one day, and we added a couple of tablespoons to lemon rosemary meatballs over whole wheat pasta tonight. We even played with the somewhat questionable idea of cheese on toast by baking cheddar cheese and worcestershire sauce on whole wheat buns for turkey burgers.



It’s pretty safe to say we’re on board here. Still, I had trouble getting past my preconceived notions about Bloody Marys, the most famous alcoholic drink to use worcestershire sauce. I admit I’ve never had one. I’ve turned my nose up at them ever since I was a freshman in college and my friends were mixing them up on a dorm room desk using vodka and tomato juice they’d stashed in their mini-fridge next to leftover slices of Totino’s pizza. The whole idea just doesn’t appeal to me, and most of that has to do with the V8 juice. Do people actually drink this stuff? It literally stinks. I mixed up my cocktail the other night with three parts V8 to one part vodka. That looked and smelled so unappetizing it frightened me, so I found myself shaking in a lot of Lea & Perrins. Even with that help, I couldn’t get past the first sip of this drink. I just don’t get it. Who does this savory drink appeal to? Why don’t I just add a few shots of vodka to a pot of chili?


If the allure of a Bloody Mary remains a mystery to this cocktail snob, the contents of Lea & Perrins need not be. According to an article published a few years ago in the Daily Mail, the closely-guarded secret ingredients of Lea & Perrins were made public when a company accountant discovered an old handwritten copy of the recipe. In addition to the vinegar, tamarind, and anchovies listed on the back of each bottle, the sauce apparently also contains cloves, pickles, peppers and lemon. If you’re feeling really ambitious, I suppose it’s now possible to make this at home, barrel it, and then wait 18 months for your sauce to fully mature. Alternatively, you could just buy some.

Where to Buy: Lea & Perrins is widely available in American grocery stores.

*Full disclosure: my friend Beth once referred to this blog by its MCM acronym to me in an email, and I had no idea what she was talking about.

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