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Worcester Sauce
Mrs. T. B. Riley.
One ounce cayenne pepper, one quart vinegar, two tablespoonsful soy, three cloves garlic pounded, three cloves shalots pounded, five anchovies bruised fine. The whole to be well mixed and rubbed through a sieve. Keep for ten days corked up, and then bottle for use. Strain or not as preferred.
A homemade imitation of bottled Worcester sauce, built on vinegar, salt fish and chili rather than the tamarind and molasses of the commercial article. The proportions are workable, but a few of the terms need translating.
- One ounce of cayenne is the number to watchAn ounce is roughly 4 to 5 tablespoons of ground cayenne in a single quart of vinegar. That is ferociously hot by current taste; a teaspoon or two gives a sauce closer to what most cooks expect from a dash bottle.
- "Soy" means soy sauceIn nineteenth-century English cookery books soy is the imported soy sauce sold by grocers, used as a coloring and savory agent. A naturally brewed soy sauce stands in.
- Cloves of garlic and shalotsShallot bulbs divide into cloves as garlic does, so "three cloves shalots" may mean three shallot cloves rather than three whole bulbs; the recipe does not say which. Shalot is an older spelling of shallot.
- The anchovies are salt-packedThe recipe assumes whole salted anchovies from a keg or jar, which carry a good deal of salt into the sauce. Rinsed salt-packed anchovies are the closest match; oil-packed fillets work but you will want to add salt to taste, and drain the oil.
- Rubbing through a sievePounding the aromatics and pressing everything through a sieve does the work a blender now does in seconds. Blend, then sieve if you want a pourable sauce rather than a paste.
- The ten days of standingThis is a maceration, not a ferment: the vinegar extracts flavor from the chili, alliums and fish. A quart of vinegar keeps the mixture strongly acidic, but with fish in it the sensible place for those ten days is the refrigerator, and that is where the bottled sauce should live afterward too.
- No sweetener, no tamarindCommercial Worcestershire is sweet-sour and mellowed by long aging. This version is sharp and salty from the first day; a spoonful of molasses or tamarind paste brings it nearer the familiar flavor if that is what you are after.
- Yield and useAbout a quart, which is a great deal of a sauce used by the teaspoon. Halve or quarter it, and treat it as a seasoning for gravies, chops, broths and oysters rather than a table condiment to be poured freely.
Bottled Worcester sauce reached the market in the 1830s and was a fixture of English and North American tables; its commercial success prompted household imitations, and recipes for them turn up in community cookery books, usually contributed by name as this one is by Mrs. T. B. Riley. The formula's bones are older than the brand: a pungent liquid seasoning built on fermented or salted fish, vinegar and aromatics descends through the English anchovy ketchups and "fish sauces" of the eighteenth century, and ultimately from the same family of ideas as Roman garum and the fish sauces of Southeast Asia. The presence of imported soy alongside cayenne, garlic and shallots is a fair snapshot of what a well-stocked Victorian store cupboard could reach for, and of how thoroughly colonial trade goods had settled into ordinary domestic cooking. Home versions like this one skipped the long barrel aging that gives the commercial sauce its rounded flavor, which is why they were valued mainly as a sharp, cheap kitchen seasoning.