This article is part of our Cocktail Chatter series, where we dive into the wild, weird, and wondrous corners of history to share over a cocktail and impress your friends.
Whether or not you can pronounce it right, Worcestershire sauce is a pantry staple. Beloved for its tangy, umami-loaded flavor profile, the sauce can usually be found alongside similar fermented condiments including fish sauce, gochujang, and ketchup. It was conceived with the intention of adding a bit of zing to dishes, many of them classics including Welsh rarebit, shepherd’s pie, and beef stew. It’s even dynamic in cocktails, like the Bloody Mary. But as for how the version of the sauce you’ll find on shelves today came to be? That was an accident.
In 1823, merchants John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins opened Lea & Perrins, a drug store along the River Severn in Worcester, England. Located approximately halfway between the major ports of Bristol and Birmingham, the shop offered food, household products, medicine, and an assortment of products from all over the world that made their way into the shop via the ports. The story goes that one day in the 1830s, Lord Sandys, a former governor of Bengal, wandered into the drug store and requested the two operators make a sauce based on a recipe he had discovered while staying in India. Using the worldly ingredients Lea and Perrins had at their disposal, they made two batches of the sauce — one for Lord Sandys, and one
