Once, I was a
"poor starving student."
Amazingly, we still use that phrase at Enema U, but today it means a
student who has a two-year-old smart phone and has to settle for only a tall
mocha crapochino instead of the venti.
But a few
decades ago (quite a few) "poor" meant that I had trouble buying
enough to eat. I worked as a night
security guard at a hotel that had large restaurants. Unfortunately, they were closed by the time
my shift began, but the empty restaurants had loads of little baskets full of
cellophane-wrapped saltine crackers.
More than one night, I made a meal of out of those crackers. I discovered that with a little imagination,
a cracker soaked in Worcestershire Sauce until it turned brown could remind you of
meat--sort of. If you don't understand
this, you need to remember that hunger is the best sauce.
Since then, I've
always had a certain fondness for Worcestershire Sauce, and not just because it
makes crackers taste good--it also has a history.
Previously, I have written about garum, the anchovy
sauce that seems to have been used throughout the Roman Empire, and I described
how a student of mine tried to follow the ancient recipe to make a sauce that
would have made Caesar proud. (Or,
perhaps just hungry.)
The student's
project was a total failure, and the EPA has designated his former home as
a potential superfund site. The
resulting toxic sauce was securely sealed in a Mason Jar and buried at the
Happy Farm (the same place where I used to take my children's pets when they
were so old they had to go live where they could run and play in the sun
everyday--you know: a hole dug in the backyard).
Evidently,
things do not ferment correctly in the desert almost a mile above sea
level. Which may be just as well, since
now, if you really want to try it, you can buy authentic garum from Amazon. (It's getting hard to think of something you can't
buy from Amazon.) Or, you could just
sample the modern day version that is sitting in your kitchen.
As the Romans
conquered the known world, they took with them their methods of war (Stick the pointy end
into the other fellow.), construction (We need another thousand slaves!), and
food (Add enough salt and rotting fish sauce and this tastes pretty
good.). And when garum sauce eventually
made its way to India, it stayed. And
stayed. In fact, it outlasted the Roman
Empire. Over time, a few more spices
were added and the flavor became a little less dependent on
rotting anchovies.
Eventually...the
British arrived. (Yes, that was a
rather long interval...Several hundred years, in fact...Think of this as the
blog equivalent of a dramatic pause.)
Though there are
several versions of this story, here's the version I prefer: In the 1830's, the wife of a British Colonial
Official returned to England from India after many years of living "in
country." Her years in India had
changed her palate and she found it difficult to adjust herself to British
fare. Once one has sampled curried lamb
and vindaloo chicken, it is rather difficult to enjoy a traditional English
meal of cold lard balls swimming in a butter sauce. (I don't know what that meal is called, but I
was served it more than once in London.)
Hoping to
recreate a little bit of India in England, she took a recipe for a favorite
sauce to the establishment of two spice merchants in Worcester. (For the benefit of the Americans reading
this, you pronounce this as 'Wooster."
It should rhyme with rooster. So
the sauce is pronounced "wooster-sure" sauce. It should not sound as if you are asking for
something like "Winchester
Shire" sauce." (Although, that
would make an excellent name for a gun oil.)
The two
merchants, Mr. Lea and Mr. Perrins set about making a batch of this in a small
wooden barrel. Not every ingredient was
available and some substitutions had to be made. When finished, the two gentlemen sampled the
concoction and immediately labeled the sauce as horrible. History has lost all record of exactly what
was said, but I think Mr. Perrins turned to his partner and said, "I
wouldn't let a cow drink from that barrel." (Well, I have no idea what he actually said,
but that's what a Texan would have said.)
The two men
wrote the concoction off as a total loss, hammered the lid back down on the
barrel, and moved it to the basement.
(They were probably waiting for a moonless night, so they could dump the
contents into a nearby canal. I've run a
boat down that canal and somebody has dumped quite a few suspicious things into
it, some of which looked a lot like lard balls in a rancid butter sauce.)
Several years
later, someone trying to find a little extra space in the basement came across
the barrel and decided to sample it. (He
probably wanted to get the taste of lunch out of his mouth). Surprisingly, the concoction now tasted
excellent. What the two spice merchants
had not realized was that the sauce needed time to ferment.
Of course, the
sauce has been on the market ever since.
In England, the same company still makes it, while in America, a
different company has licensed it and makes it under the same name: Lea &
Perrins'. And today, the company still
ages the sauce in wooden barrels for a minimum of three years. (This is after
they age the salted anchovies in barrels for three to five years.)
As I discussed
last week, the British Army has been all over the world, and everywhere it
went, the British Mess included Worcestershire Sauce. Archaeologists have uncovered these
distinctive bottles at the remains of almost every old British fort and
military encampment.
At this point,
you might be asking yourself, "Why?
Why did the British Army take this sauce everywhere they went? It doesn't taste that
good."
The answer has
to do with British military rations. The
British army shipped canned beef to its soldiers all over the world and some of
the preservatives used turned the meat a pale green! Even Englishmen found it hard to eat green
canned beef. Besides adding flavor,
as we all know, Worcestershire Sauce will paint almost anything a dark brown
color. You can make almost
anything--even green beef--look like "normal" meat.
So, it's not
just for crackers.
Virtually anything with taste in British cuisine comes from India. I blame the British Navy, whose shipboard chefs de' cuisine came up with such delicacies as boiled fuzzy pork, biscuit au' weevils and ratatouie (with actual rats). When these hardy sailors stopped over in India to assist in conquering the place, a place where spices were used to hide the flavor of rot and the smell of the Ganges in the hot summer, they realized they'd hit upon something. Rather the way Texans discovered jalapenos and chili peppers tend to cover up certain of the riper Tex-Mex dishes the cattle trail cooks used to come up with.
ReplyDeleteAlas the missus now has a gastro-intestinal disorder and I am reduced to living on bland, unspiced food reminiscent of the only cuisine worse than that served up on British frigates - hospital food!
And in 500 years someone will be writing the equivalent of a blog about Mc I Lenny Tabasco sauce and the post imperial American Empire and the militaries fetish for the stuff, with small bottles in all the rations that the troops ate. Idly enough it had the power to make an MRE taste half way edible.
ReplyDeleteYou are off by 499 years, 364 days, 13 hours, and 32 minutes. Or, in other words, check back here at 12:01 tonight.
ReplyDeleteI've written a limerick suitable for the occasion:
ReplyDeletehttp://thevagabondmoon.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-limerick-for-worcesterians.html