A thin brown, savoury, tangy, spiced Sauce, a delightful hit of umami in a bottle, Worcestershire sauce is firmly established as one of the world’s leading condiments with global sales of $805.6 million in 2021. While following in the footsteps of fermented fish sauces like garum, the ketchup of the Roman world, it was created purely by chance, or so the story goes.

John Lea and William Perrins had run a chemist shop in Broad Street in Worcester since 1823. One day, they were visited by Lord Marcus Sandys who had recently returned to the family seat at nearby Ombersley Court after a spell as Governor of Bengal. While out in India he had developed a taste for a particular sauce which he asked the chemists to reproduce from a recipe he had obtained.

Chemists rather than chefs, Lea and Perrins did their best, but without the precise quantities of the ingredients what they produced they found, according to the Lea & Perrins website, to be “completely unpalatable”. The fish and vegetable mixture had such a strong and unpleasant smell that they stored it in their cellar and promptly forgot about it. It was only rediscovered some eighteen months later, by which time it had matured into a delicious sauce.

Recognising the commercial possibilities of their sauce, Lea and Perrins bottled it in the only containers they had available, their round medicine bottles. The distinctive bottle shape with its long neck is still used today. Launched locally in 1837, their sauce proved to be such a hit that they had to take over the premises next door to manufacture the quantities required.

One of their early marketing ploys was to arrange for all ocean-going liners travelling to and from England to stock Worcestershire sauce in their restaurants, even paying waiters to serve it. By 1839 the sauce had reached the United States and so popular was it that the importer, John Duncan of New York, opened a processing plant, bringing the ingredients from England, and manufactured the sauce exactly to Lea and Perrins’ formula. The American version nowadays, though, is different, using distilled white vinegar instead of malt vinegar, three times more sugar and more than three times as much sodium.

Doubt has been cast on the veracity of this version of the sauce’s origin, as the informative blog, The Heart Thrills, points out. There is no record that Lord Marcus, who was not elevated to the peerage until 1860, ever went to Bengal, let alone serve as its governor, nor did any of his immediate family. Nor was the idea of creating an anchovy-based sauce unique to Lea and Perrins.

As early as 1747 Hannah Glasse included in her The Art of Cookery Made Plain & Easy a recipe for Anchovy Sauce, while in 1830 Dr William Kitchiner gave a recipe in his The Cook’s Oracle and House Keeper’s Manual for Fish Sauce, which he had received from a “very sagacious sauce-maker”. Kitchiner’s sauce called for six anchovies pounded, two wine glasses of port, two of walnut pickle, four of mushroom catsup, sliced and pounded eschalots, a tablespoonful of soy, and half a drachm of Cayenne pepper. The ingredients were simmered gently for ten minutes, the liquid strained, and when cold, bottled and corked.

Even an Indian twist was not unique to Lea and Perrins. Since 1830 rival Worcester chemists, Twinberrow and Evans, had been selling a sauce they had developed which pandered to the growing demand for condiments spiced with the flavours of India. Meanwhile Worcester sauce was a term used to describe the sauces that local traders used to make to complement the taste of a delicacy, lampreys, which were caught in the River Severn.