… the Roman origins of Lea & Perrins

Each week, one of the star presenters of popular history podcast ‘The Rabbit Hole Detectives’ divulges their favourite nuggets

Like Harold Wilson and Larkin’s Mr Bleaney, I have a terrible fondness for bottled sauces and condiments, and have a shelf in my kitchen cupboard where I keep Henderson’s Relish, creamed horseradish, redcurrant jelly, Sriracha, Baron Pouget de St Victor’s Oxford sauce, and – primus inter pares – Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce. It is my go-to enlivener of “soups, stews and casseroles” as the label advised, also essential for a Bloody Mary, tater ’ash, Welsh rarebit and Oysters Kilpatrick.

It is nearly 200 years old and made by chemists who were mucking about with recipes to meet the raised expectations of English customers who had lived in India. How to make a spicy savoury sauce that would perk up the plainnest of meals? Anchovies were the key, but the initial results were unpromising and the jar sat on a shelf for two years before it was reopened, sampled and found to be delicious thanks to the processes of fermentation. A great condiment was born, or rather rediscovered, for in the ancient world something very similar – garum – was used from Spain to the Crimea to improve the flavour of food, or in some cases disguise it.

Garum was made from anchovies that were salted and fermented with fish guts. The solids were then separated from the liquid, which was bottled and sold. Not only was a sauce born, but also a means of manufacturing and distributing it. Unfortunately, along came the Dark Ages and with it the collapse of the Roman Empire’s infrastructure. Garum, along with other processed foods like salt and spices, faded from the menu so everyone had to eat unseasoned turnips awaiting the revival of civilisation.

There were oases of savoury excitement. Mustard, for example, grew happily in Britain and thanks to the monasteries it was cultivated and processed. The monks of Tewkesbury Abbey got so good at it their mustard became famous. Even Shakespeare refers to it, when Falstaff says a man’s wits were “as thick as Tewkesbury Mustard”. Thick, because after it was milled it was mixed with horseradish and formed into balls that were dried on boards and then sold. When you wanted some you shaved a bit off and moistened it with verjuice to create a sticky paste.

When Henry VIII visited Tewkesbury in 1535, they presented him with special mustard balls covered with gold leaf – golden balls for the copper-nosed king. Tewkesbury was eventually eclipsed by Durham, where in the 1720s, a Mrs Clements produced a mustard made from milled mustard flour, a process industrialised a hundred years later by Mr Colman of Norwich, who ever since has been synonymous with English mustard. A debt to Mrs Clements is perhaps acknowledged by every tin and jar of Colman’s, which bears the likeness of a Durham shorthorn bull – rather that, perhaps, than Henry VIII’s golden balls.

I will be discussing this and more with my fellow Rabbit Hole Detectives Cat Jarman and Charles Spencer – and how a grocer in Nottingham sold for £150 a preparation that made another a £440million fortune.

‘The Rabbit Hole Detectives’ is out every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts

Odd fish: garum, an anchovy sauce, can be traced back to the Roman era