Worcestershire Sauce

This is a manufacturing formula lifted from a nineteenth-century book of trade recipes, not a kitchen recipe, and it cannot be safely made or bottled today. The notes below explain the ingredients and the specific hazards.

• Why it fails: bottled meat puréeTwenty pounds of boiled hog's liver, sieved and stirred into the liquid, is a low-acid meat slurry sealed in bottles at room temperature. That is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, which thrives without oxygen and produces a toxin that no amount of vinegar in an unmeasured blend can be assumed to prevent. There is no pH figure, no processing temperature, and no hold time anywhere in the formula.
• Why it fails: no acidity controlFifteen gallons of vinegar sounds like a lot until you weigh it against some thirty gallons of catsups, wine, soy and brandy, plus the liver purée and whatever water goes through the sieve with it. The finished pH is unknown and unknowable from the text, so the preservation depends entirely on guesswork. A current, tested recipe should be used if you want a homemade Worcestershire-style sauce.
• The twelve-hour boilBoiling the liver for twelve hours with repeated changes of water appears to have been intended to leach it and break it down, not to sterilise the finished sauce. In any case the formula specifies no further heating once the purée is worked through the sieve, mixed with the sauce and bottled, so whatever safety that step conferred is not carried into the bottle.
• ScaleThe measured liquids alone come to some forty-five gallons before the liver purée and its water are added — well over a hundred and fifty litres. This is a wholesaler's batch, intended for a bottling house, which is why the last line offers proportionate reduction rather than a household yield.
• Walnut and mushroom catsupBefore tomato took the word over, "catsup" meant any thin, dark, salted, spiced brine. Walnut catsup was made from green walnuts salted until they blackened; mushroom catsup from salted mushrooms pressed and spiced. Both were sold commercially in Britain and America through the nineteenth century, and both are now specialist items.
• Cantor soyMost likely a rendering of 'Canton soy', the period name for Chinese soy sauce shipped through Canton; spellings drift badly in formularies of this kind. On that reading it means imported dark soy.
• AsafoetidaA resin from a giant fennel relative, sold in lumps and dissolved in spirit as here. It is a legitimate food ingredient, still standard in Indian cooking, and its sulphurous pungency may be standing in for the anchovy of commercial Worcestershire.
• CapsicumTwo pounds of powdered capsicum spread through forty-odd gallons is a mild background heat, not a hot sauce. Nineteenth-century 'capsicum' was usually dried cayenne of unspecified strength.
• The claim of purityThe opening line — that the commercial article is "generally adulterated" — is a stock phrase of the period, when food adulteration was a genuine public scandal and formula books sold themselves on exposing it. It is a sales pitch, not a verdict on any particular brand.