More Gentleman’s Relish
It was Englishman John Osborn, a grocer or provision merchant living in Paris, who developed the recipe for the Gentleman’s Relish. A rather complicated process, it involved taking Spanish anchovy fillets, packing them for eighteen months into barrels of salt to mature, and then brine rinsing them, before cooking them at a simmer, cooling and then blending them with butter, rusk, and Osborn’s “secret blend” of herbs and spices to give it its luxurious depth of flavour.
Experimenting with anchovies seems to have been an early 19th century pastime. By 1828 Osborn had begun marketing his spread to his Parisian clientele as a tasty and nutritious snack that could be easily transported and stored, predating Lea and Perrins’ anchovy-based Worcestershire sauce by nine years.
To give it extra gravitas, he called it Patum Peperium, mixing his Latin and Greek etymological roots as freely as he did his herbs and spices. It was also a misnomer as it is more of a fish butter than a paste of peppers. Nevertheless, the name stuck, and the spread’s distinctive taste began to find favour with the sophisticated palate of the Parisian gourmand, winning a Citation Favorable for Osborn at the Paris Food Shows of 1849 and 1855.
Osborn’s son moved the business over to England where Patum Peperium, now the fashionable dish for the savoury course, was so closely associated with the gentry and gentlemen’s clubs that it was considered “too strong” for ladies and “too refined” for the hoi polloi. When people asked for it, they added the rider “You know, the gentleman’s relish”. The Gentleman’s Relish was only incorporated onto the product’s labelling later in the century where it has remained ever since.
Success brought competition, strengthening Osborn’s resolve to keep the recipe for his spice blend which gave Patum Peperium its distinctive taste a closely guarded secret. Rival products were but a pale imitation of the real thing and to ensure that that remained the case, the secret of Osborn’s mix was kept tightly within the family, passed down from father to son for over a century.
In 1971, however, with no heir to pass the business on to, it was sold to Elsenham Quality Foods, who maintained the tradition of secrecy by ensuring that no one employee knew the full recipe. Changes, though, were made, including replacing the distinctive round porcelain pots with plastic and, in 1998, to celebrate its 170th anniversary, the introduction of Angler’s Relish, featuring mackerel, and Poacher’s Relish, made with salmon.
In 2001 Elsenham were bought out by G. Costa which was in turn acquired by AB World Foods with the Gentleman’s Relish joining the company’s stable of distinctive flavours that included Patak’s, Blue Dragon, Levi Roots, Al’Fez, and Tabasco. It is now manufactured in Poland, still using Osborn’s original recipe, with supermarkets accounting for around 70% of the million or so pots sold a year. Although plastic pots are the norm, porcelain pots are revived for the annual special edition, each one hand painted.
On the internet there are recipes that aim to replicate Osborn’s blend of spices and herbs, still a closely guarded secret. One on British Food History’s website uses a sextet of classic 19th century spices – Cayenne pepper, cinnamon, ground nutmeg, ground mace, ground ginger, and ground black pepper – with Cayenne pepper the dominant spice to provide heat.
For those of us content to eat the real thing, the instructions confusingly advise use to use it both sparingly and within six weeks of opening, but, as Andrew Webb observed in Food Britannica (2011), it is not “a product for lavish slathering, but for gentlemanly deportment”. Quite so.
