That Black Sauce in an English Bottle
For nearly 170 years any Lowcountry seafood recipe with a sauce or liquid component almost invariably included Worcestershire sauce. How did this fermented brew of smashed anchovy, tamarind, barley malt vinegar and molasses become the master additive after salt and pepper? What was the flavor theory behind its universal adoption? How did it get introduced into the southern pantry?
The commercial history has been told on countless occasions, particularly by the Lea and Perrins company of Worcestershire, UK. It was the creation of the Lea & Perrins apothecary in the 1830s, no doubt one of the liquid condiments fashioned as digestive aids (bitters, digestifs. etc.) popular since the mid-18th century. The early ads indicated that it was “prepared from the Recipe of a Nobleman in the County.” And much speculation about who this nobleman was, and whether the sauce derived from India has been published in the past twenty-five years. Culinary historians, however, are on more solid ground when they observe that this appears a latter day attempt to fashion an equivalent of the classical Roman garum, a salty pungent fish sauce.
It began to be imported in substantial quantity in the United States in early 1843 by John Duncan & Son in New York City. In November 1843 he appears in a list of “rich fish and meat sauces” imported by Dickson & Mills, of Charleston, South Carolina. [Charleston Courier November 3, 1843), 3] It headed a list that also included Reading, John Bull, Quin’s Camp, Carice, India Soy, and Harvey sauces. Its primacy suggests that from the first it was esteemed the most useful and flavorsome of the sauces. Only John Bull’s sauce of the others would last a decade. Indeed, Worcestershire sauce dominated a category of sauces that vied with pepper sauces (supplying heat) and catsups (a category that emphasized a sweet-savory mixture). Worcestershire sauce had an acidulous sour note, supplied by tamarind, with a more pronounced salt and earthy taste (supplied by the anchovy), along with the sweetness of molasses. It has a surprisingly sharp tang.
The sauce more than any other available to 19th-century Americans supplied that earthy quality that 21st century culinarians call umami. This is not so much an issue with meat, which has its own quality of umami. It is more needful for fish and seafood. Southerners had little notion about the ingredients that made up this deep flavor. They didn’t associate the taste of anchovy sauce with the fermented anchovy component in Lea and Perrins. They suspected that the astringency derived from ginger. When the Civil War blockade prevented importation of Lea & Perrin’s sauce South Carolinians concocted their own ‘Worcester.” The formula was not even close—but gives and idea of the taste imagination of apothecaries in the South:
“Take one gallon of ripe tomatos, wash them in three quarts of water, boil it half down and strain it through a sieve. When all is drained, add two table spoonfuls of ginger, two of mace, two of whole black pepper, two of salt, one of cloves, one of cayenne; let them simmer in the juice until reduced to one quart, pour in half a pint of best vinegar, then pour the whole through a hair sieve, bottle in half pint bottles, cork down, tightly seal, and keep in a cool place.” [Charleston Mercury 7-18-1863.]
This sounds like an early recipe for tomato catsup.
When Charleston held its 150th anniversary celebration of Nat Fuller’s Feast on April 19, 2015, Sean Brock fashioned his own scratch-made Worcestershire to accompany his three fish offerings. Fuller’s bills of fare repeatedly indicated that he served fish—particularly white fleshed fish that had been poached/boiled—with Worcestershire. Brock’s version—which combined the above formula with a fermented anchovy sauce of his own manufacture, was complex, less thin than Lea & Perrins, and a memorable complement to his fillets.
Experimenting with exotic ingredients as condiments became somewhat common in Great Britain and Anglo-America in the 1790s, when British and American trading vessels began adding curry powder to the other spices from south Asia and India. Tamarind, native to Africa and long cultivated in India, was the exotic, global commerce, of Worcestershire. The South embraced these elements more readily than New England. And southern fish stews—which tended to be less milk based the northern chowders—began expanding their constituent ingredients, in large measure because of the influence of African-American household cooks. The hot pepper came into play before the turn of the nineteenth century. The tomato became a standard ingredient in the 1830s (tomato ketchup and tomato paste would become late nineteenth century equivalents). Using roux as a thickener became commonplace in Charleston and Savannah in the later 1840s. The adding of Sherry or Madeira as a finisher to a fish stew can be attributed to the influence of green turtle stews and Terrapin a la Maryland which skyrocketed in repute during the first half of the nineteenth century. Worcestershire Sauce appeared on the scene just as roux, tomatoes, and sherry had transformed the character of seafood soups and stews. It supplied an astringent, salty bass note that harmonized with the sweet and caramel dimensions that had come into the dishes. By 1860 is was standard in red chowders (those incorporating tomatoes), crab stews, shrimp gravies, shrimp pie, and the entire range of deviled seafood dishes. It did not appear in early gumbos, but by the 1880s the sauce’s associations with seafood was such that you would find it appearing in some versions.
One can look at a number of the signature dishes of Lowcountry fish and seafood cookery as consolidations of taste innovations that took place over the course of the nineteenth century. Consider this recipe for the Pee Dee Region’s cherished open air event dish.
Pine Bark Stew for Fifty People
50 lbs fish 1 bottle Worcestershire sauce
2 lbs. fat bacon Red pepper
6 lbs. onions Black pepper
2 gals. tomato catsup Salt
2 gals. tomatoes 1 lb. butter
Cut bacon in ¼ inch squares, fry in bottom of stew pot. Slice onions and cook until done in bacon grease thinned with a little water. Add catsup and other ingredients. Lastly, put in fish and boil briskly for 30 minutes. Serve with rice.
Stewart Clare in Mrs. Don Richardson, Carolina Lowcountry Cook Book of Georgetown, South Carolina (Charleston: Walker, Evans & Cogswell, 1963), 154.