I’m Not Quite Sure How to Say This…

In 1837, chemists and business partners John Wheeley Lea and William Perrins decided to clean out the piles of forgotten treasures and banished mistakes from the basement of their pharmacy in Worcester, England. In doing so, they rediscovered one particularly awful batch of a failed sauce they’d attempted to produce two years earlier.

The pair had been commissioned to make the sauce by the third Baron Sandys, Lord Marcus Hill, who’d returned to England after serving as the Governor of Bengal, with a terrible hankering for a particular sauce he had grown fond of in India. 

Tangy, sweet, sour, salty, smoky, and hard to pronounce.

He described a tangy, sweet, sour, salty, smoky sauce that would be great in a beef stew or as part of a marinade or thrown together with some tomato juice, vodka, and maybe even celery, if for some reason you crave a refreshing glass of cold alcoholic brunch soup. Also maybe there was some fish in it?

Like a couple of kids let loose in the backyard with a bucket, a hose, and all the leaves, twigs, and mud they can pull together, Lea and Perrins got to work. What they ended up with was every bit as edible as a bucket of garden muck. 

The awful experimental sauce was banished to the basement, leaving Baron Sandys to dream of tastier days in India, the muck not to be thought of again until two years later when it was rediscovered during the great cleanup. 

I do like to use Worcestershire Sauce for a lot of things, but this I could do without. Trilbeee, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s not clear why the two pharmacists decided to give their previous failure another taste, but that’s what they did. To their amazement, they discovered a mellowed and flavorful fermented sauce that made them think it might just be the missing ingredient in, according to this practical historian’s opinion, the worst thing to ever happen to brunch. Though their sauce is excellent in a beef stew or as part of a marinade.

The two decided they should market their new discovery, but it needed a name that would roll off the tongue. After mulling it over for not nearly long enough, they decided to name the sauce after the town in which they lived. Worcestershire Sauce was born. 

Personally I think it could have used a bit more workshopping. I’m sure the great citizens of Worcester have no trouble with it, but for the rest of us, the name probably leaves us a little tongue tied. In a recent informal Facebook poll of the people I know, in which I asked what words in English do you think are hardest to pronounce, buried between some excellent answers like brewery, espresso, cinnamon, mischievous, and etcetera, were several mentions of Worcestershire Sauce. 

On second thought, maybe a small brand refresh can hurt a little bit.

Despite the difficult name, the sauce took off, first throughout England, and then across the pond and around the world. In case you want to use the name for a similar sauce of your own, a court ruling in 1876 declared it not copyrighted. Of course if you’d rather, you could take a page from TikTok cowboy cook sensation Pepper Belly Pete who markets his Worcestershire-inspired sauce (say that five times fast) as Worshyoursister Sauce.

I suppose a small brand refresh never hurts, but Lee & Perrins has remained the same since the beginning. I did recently learn that it uses a slightly different recipe in the US market than in Worcester, but it still comes in a brown glass bottle, often wrapped in paper for safer shipping. I never found out whether Baron Sandys liked the sauce, or whether it really did resemble what he’d enjoyed in India, but there’s little doubt brunch just wouldn’t be the same without Worstesheresher Woostesher Warchestershyre that tangy, sweet, sour, salty, smoky sauce that goes in a Bloody Mary. And maybe there’s fish in it?