Worcestershire Sauce

There is so much more to that little paper-wrapped bottle than anyone lets on. It’s a fermented, anchovy-based umami sauce with roots in Roman fish sauce, invented by two chemists in Worcester in 1837, carried around the globe by the British Empire, and reinvented everywhere it landed — into Japan’s tonkatsu sauce, El Salvador’s salsa inglesa, Brazil’s molho inglês. It’s the umami cheat code in half my cooking. This is the whole story: the history, what’s really in it and how that changed, why the homemade version is a different condiment entirely, and how the world made it its own.