Following up on a previous post on the Catchup to Keep 20 Years from Hannah Glasse’s 1770 edition of the Art of Cookery cookbook, is the meal we cooked a few days ago. I cracked the jars of catsup made with Glasse’s recipe and extensively filtered the liquid results. The result was a dark brown thin liquid with a strong, spicy odor. A couple of taste tests confirmed my suspicion that the sauce was a forerunner of Worcestershire sauce, first commercially marketed under that name in 1838, by pharmacists John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins.
There are many myths about where Lea and Perrins got their recipe from. One such myth is that the recipe came from, “a nobleman in the county.” Another one is that Lord Marcus Sandys, ex-Governor of Bengal encountered it while in India with the East India Company in the 1830s, and commissioned Lea and Perrins to recreate it. (All well and good, except that Lord Marcus Sandys was never Governor of Bengal.) Not surprisingly, none of the origin stories for Worcestershire sauce ever mentions English cookbook author, Hannah Glasse. Another woman erased from history by men out to turn a profit on a product.
I was drawn to try the recipe not only to compare it to commercial Worcestershire sauces, but to also look more closely at the sauce’s tenuous ties to Carthaginian-Roman garum. For those new to the blog, I made my own garum at home, held a cookoff with several cooks around the world using it in recipes, and worked with a Vintner to reformulate a modern Oenogarum using it. Glasse’s catsup soaks and/or ferments anchovies in stale beer as the basis of the sauce, whereas the foundations of most garum condiments are a digestion of fish or shellfish or varying species. Modern Worcestershire sauces generally use a barley malt instead of stale beer and rely on a prior salt ferment of onions and garlic for most of their flavor. Although it is easy to see and taste the linkages between Glasse’s sauce with modern Worcestershire sauce, neither one produces a product anything like garum. Also, unlike garum, they bring a “desired” outside flavor to dishes, while garum simply enhances flavors of dishes with a blast of umami.
So, in her original 1770 recipe, Glasse suggests that a spoon or sauce in one pound of butter makes an excellent sauce for fish. We varied that a bit and use 5-6 spoons of sauce for 1/2 stick of sweet butter and found the results delicious on baked cod. I marinated the fish in some additional sauce first, and put salt and pepper on the filets before baking at 400F for 20 minutes in a buttered pan. When done, I plated them and poured the butter with Glasse’s sauce over the fish and served the filets. Everyone was satisfied, and the recipes sparked a lot of interesting table conversation. One thing I forgot to mention was that like Lea and Perrins claimed, I forgot about the sauce for almost three years while we were on 24/7 coverage during COVID-19 at work. Anyway, if you are interested in tackling this Culinary History Mystery on your own, have fun, but dont forget to share your results!
Words and photographs by Laura M. Kelley