Golden brown
Caroline O’Donoghue
NEW
The history of empire teaches us that people go to war over two things: God and spices. It makes sense, then, that the most controversial condiment in our kitchens is the one absolutely packed with the latter which has attracted the kind of reverence of the former.
I am, of course, talking about brown sauce.
This is a sauce with connotations. Mustard can mean anything from a yellow squeezy bottle at a New York City hotdog stand, to a stoutly middle-class tin of Coleman’s or a Piccadilly Wholegrain jar that is snapped closed with a metal hook and an orange airtight seal. Ketchup is more workaday, but you still get posh ketchups.
When you try to posh-up brown sauce however, you get chutney, which is the exact kind of reverse engineering that gave us HP Sauce in the first place. A Nottinghamshire grocer invented it in the 1870s as a cost effective way to make the spoils of the empire a little more mass-market, pouring in dates, tamarind, cayenne pepper, molasses and whatever other odds and ends from the colonies that could be melted down to a burnt, vinegary flavour we now know simply as “brown.”