Worcestershire Sauce Was a Failed Recipe Left in a Cellar for Years

John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins ran a chemists' shop on Broad Street in the English city of Worcester in the 1830s. The standard origin story goes like this. A customer asked them to reproduce a fish sauce he had developed a taste for, said to come from Bengal. They mixed the ingredients to spec. The result was so harsh that they considered it unsellable and rolled the barrel into the cellar. According to company lore, the barrel sat there for several years before someone — perhaps clearing space — pried it open, tasted the contents, and discovered the sharp brew had aged into something quite different.

The new sauce went on sale in 1837. The recipe Lea & Perrins still uses today is built on malt vinegar, molasses, sugar, salt, anchovies, tamarind extract, onions and garlic, with smaller amounts of cloves, soy sauce, lemon and chili. Anchovies are essential — they are the source of the deep umami the sauce delivers in tiny doses, the same effect ancient Romans got from fermented fish in garum. The mash is fermented in oak vats for many months before it is filtered and bottled.

The customer the company calls Lord Marcus Sandys, supposedly a former governor of Bengal, may not have existed. Brian Keogh, in his 2009 history The Secret Sauce, found no record of any Sandys serving in India in the relevant period. The story is repeated on every label anyway, partly because the actual history — two pharmacists rediscovering an over-strong fermented condiment in their basement — does not change the result on a steak.

The brand became so dominant so fast that in 1876 the High Court ruled "Worcestershire sauce" was a generic term and could not be trademarked. Lea & Perrins kept their formula instead.