Worcestershire sauce
Worcestershire sauce (
i), sometimes shortened to Worcester sauce (), is a fermented liquid condiment of complex mixture, of British origin from Worcester, and popularised by Lea & Perrins. The essential ingredients are barley malt vinegar, spirit vinegar, molasses, sugar, salt, anchovies, tamarind extract, onions, and garlic; particular brands add other spices as well to taste. It is often an ingredient in Welsh rarebit, Caesar salad, Oysters Kirkpatrick, and sometimes added to chili con carne, beef stew, hamburgers, and other beef dishes. Worcestershire sauce is also used to flavour cocktails such as a Bloody Mary or Caesar. Known as salsa inglesa (English sauce) in Spanish, it is also an ingredient in michelada, the Mexican beer cocktail.
History
A fermented fish sauce called garum was a staple of Greco-Roman cuisine and of the Mediterranean economy of the Roman Empire, as the first-century encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder writes in his Historia Naturalis and the fourth/fifth-century Roman culinary text Apicius includes garum in its recipes. The use of similar fermented anchovy sauces in Europe can be traced back to the 17th century. The Lea & Perrins brand was commercialised in 1837 and has continued to be the leading global brand of Worcestershire sauce.
