Features

THE BRITISH SAUCE

In the first half of 1944 - I can’t exactly remember when as we lived a kind of timeless existence in Japanese time and year reckoning - at the age of eleven we, the teenage boys, had to leave our mothers, sisters and younger brothers in the women’s prison camp “Cideng” in West Jakarta, to be transported to a boy’s camp. It wasn’t far as the crow flies, probably only twenty kilometres, but by train it took us the greater part of the day to get there through the slums and outskirts of war time Jakarta, stopping sometimes for hours in the blazing sun for reasons unknown to us. As it turned out, the new camp was a disused asylum for the mentally disabled called Grogol, which was situated near where the new Sukarno-Hatta International Airport is now on the way to a small town west of Jakarta called Tangerang.
Although it seems I have conveniently suppressed and forgotten many events of those woeful war days, I will never forget our arrival in Grogol, and not for reasons of horror or joy or some dramatic incident. No, it was because of a small insignificant bottle of “English” sauce. After arrival, a couple of my friends and myself were “shouted” into a small room in a wooden building with pale blue walls and a covered walkway. The entrance door could only be closed from the outside (because of the insane for which the place was initially built) but we were allowed to go in and out as we pleased. Being secured into the greater area of the camp, surrounded by barbed wire, bamboo fences and watch towers occupied by soldiers with long barrelled guns, there was little danger of escape and even if we could, where would we go?
When I entered the room we were allotted - I must have been the first one to do so - I immediately noticed a solitary bottle of Worcestershire sauce on a shelf, which was of course forthwith confiscated and put in the knapsack my mother had filled with some clothes and other necessities the previous night. I never found out who our predecessors were but they must have been so well off that they thought the sauce unimportant. It could also have been that they were forced to leave in a hurry, being put on transport to some other place of incarceration, but why was the place clean and swept with nothing in the bare room but this conspicuous bottle of the traditional British sauce?
Worcestershire sauce, or “English Sauce” as we called it, is not a popular sauce on the Dutch dinner table nor in the Dutch kitchen. In fact, I knew about it but I had never tasted it. I did have a cucumber that day but don’t ask me where it came from as I can’t remember that either. As soon as we had settled down on the floor, I ate the cucumber sprinkled with that famous and spicy sauce. To this day, when I taste a few drops of Worcestershire sauce or even smell it, I recall the occasion. What I also remember is that there was a “Petay Cina” tree growing in the small patch in front of our room. This small tree is called “Katin” in Thailand and the Latin name is leucocephala. It is of the Leguminosae or the pea family and popular with Nam Prik or chilli sauce. The young leaves and the unripe peas have a flavour similar to the much larger Setoh beans which I described some months ago. “Setoh” trees are huge and prefer a wet climate and flourish in the rain forest while the “Katin” is happier with a savannah climate, like that of the North East of Thailand or right here in Pattaya where there is an abundance of them. I also ate the Katin leaves with the “English” sauce, but it being a small bottle, and with sharing the contents with my friends, unfortunately it was soon empty.
The story of the origin of Worcestershire Sauce, which is called “Sauce Katay” or rabbit sauce in Thailand after the tiny picture of a rabbit on the right side of the label, is most interesting, if it is true. (To my dismay, while I was writing this I went to look for a bottle of the sauce and discovered that the manufacturers have redesigned the label and made the unforgivable error of dropping the rabbit).
In about 1837, the very year Queen Victoria ascended the throne of the British Empire, a retired governor of Bengal, India, returned to Britain and visited one of a chain of druggists owned by the brothers Lea and Perrins in the city of Worcester. He gave them a recipe of an Indian sauce, or chutney, to be made up to order. When done, the flavour did not satisfy the old colonial and he rejected it. The management forgot about the brew until a few years later when inventory was made and the cask containing the mixture was found in the cellar. It was tasted and found excellent. Put on sale it proved popular and - the recipe had not been lost - more was made to meet the demand. Soon Lea and Perrins even started to produce it for export and it became one of the most popular bottled sauces in the world. In this country it is mainly sprinkled on one’s breakfast eggs or on juicy steaks. The latter together with a whole battery of savoury sauces like “Tomato Ketchup”, “Maggi”, “Tobasco” , “Steak Sauce”, “H.P. Sauce” or what have you? I assure you that it is a nerve wrecking business for the serious restaurateur and it has often make me weep and sulk when it was one of my special steak creations which received this treatment.
According to Tom Stobart, the distinguished author and mountaineer, in his book “Herbs, Spices and Flavourings”, Worcestershire sauce is made from vinegar, soy sauce, molasses, salt anchovies, red chillies, ginger, shallots, garlic and so on. In all, over twenty different fruits and spices. The concoction is matured in an oak’s hogshead for a long period. Like most bottled sauces, Worcestershire sauce is meant to enhance tasteless cooking but it is also used by many great cooks for that secret ingredient in such and such a dish.. Personally, apart from using it in a cocktail like a Bloody Mary, and whenever I feel like reviving those war time days and smell it, I do not use it in my cooking or put it in any of the dishes on the table. That does not mean that I disapprove of it, only that I am just not accustomed to it.