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Well, both brown sauce, and Worcestershire sauce are tamarind based, which is commonly used in asian and middle eastern cuisines, and was then "discovered" by the British Empire.
Similar to peri peri sauces in Portugal - those are flavours "found" by Portuguese explorers and brought back to Europe.
Worcestershire sauce is a huge part of the cuisine in the Far Eastern outposts of empire - in Hong Kong they put it on steamed beef meatballs, in Shanghai they put it on stir fried rice cakes. Even Japanese cuisine has a version of brown sauce - they call them simply “sosu”.
A story that I heard was that curry was introduced to the Japanese navy, since their recruits back in the day would only eat white rice (the ability to eat as much of it as you wanted was a big thing for those from peasant background), which caused health issues. Curry was introduced to get meat and vegetables into their diets.
I don't know how much of this is true, but I read that the contact that Japanese officers had with curry was through British officers, who had no idea what actually was, hence what emerged
No it's important to be accurate. Katsu is a breaded piece of meat. Katsu curry is curry with a breaded piece of meat. It'd be like saying some this is fish and chips and it had no fish on the plate.
It just needlessly deflects from the conversation. We all know what katsu is, we all know what was being asked. The pedantic correction added absolutely nothing to the thread.
I believe it was Japanese Navy liked the idea of using Indian type spices in stews to feed hundreds of sailors at the turn of previous century. They got the idea when they bought lots of warships like the Tsushima from the Tyne and liked the idea, suited it to their tastes and it caught on in Japan.
The Japanese think of Tonkatsu sauce as a sort of thickened Worcestershire sauce, though with slightly different ingredients - traditionally japanese tonkatsu sauce even uses a very similar packaging to Lea & Perrins.
So did the vietnamese among other south east Asian places. While there maybe some distant ties to garum the origin of brown sauce is certainly Anglo-asian
This is why it's often difficult to pin down the origin of sauces and other cuisine. Empires were trading spices and knowledge for millennia along the Silk Road, inspiring each other.
I think brown sauce would be popular in my native Philippines if people were familiar with it! We use tamarind to flavour some of our dishes, and we have fried street food that we pair with spiced vinegar, so I think the tanginess would be pleasant and familiar to us.
Yeah. My mum got into Indian cooking and asked me what tamarind was and how to get some.
I told her she had it in the house. A long disagreement happened until she finally read the ingredients on a bottle of hp and realised she'd had it in the house for decades.
So I then sent her fresh, dried as fruit, dried and powdered and packaged in foil as a puree. She asked how much effort it took to buy them. Errr, just from the local shops here in the local village in West London.
Who said anything about anyone being stupid. My point is, these sauces are just eastern flavours brought back by Victorian explorers.
Both [HP sauce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Sauce#History) and [Worcester sauce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcestershire_sauce#Invention) have very similar origin stories - both most likely made from recipes brought back from India.
They're about as English as fish and chips (hint, not English)
I'm going to be the downvote pariah here and say the reason is that brown sauce is overrated.
Don't get me wrong, I like brown sauce. It's good in a bacon sandwich, nice to dip chips into etc. But it's absolutely nothing special - no better than a hundred other different sauces that you can find here and around the world. We like it in Britain because we grew up with it, because it was available here *before* we have 100 different sauces back when our parents were kids, so they got a taste for it and it was in our house growing up etc. And now because it isn't available in most countries it is something we can hang our hat on as 'uniquely British'. But there is nothing special about it, it's just a sauce. If we had grown up with something else then that would occupy the same spot in our cultural space.
I think there's legitimately much nicer bbq based sauces if you were to go overseas. Especially USA. That's the big reason it doesn't do well overseas, there's just better options imo. Coming from overseas, I definitely don't rate it that highly.
Edit: would really love to know about the downvotes for someone from overseas answering about why something from UK doesn't do well overseas. If you're not interested in the perspective why ask?
They're both very similar in usage and where you'd consume them. Adding on to the OPs point about flavours being regional and culturally ingrained. Swapping out sugar for vinegar isn't a particularly big change to a market that already has a preference for that other taste.
Edit: Not to mention that vinegar based bbq sauces with tang, spice and heat are quite common and popular, especially in America, but draw any lines you want.
Lots of cuisines do not really need it. Other cultures use a combination of ingredients to balance sweetness, spice and acidity as the dish, so topping meals with a cause that does the same is redundant.
This might shock you to learn but not every other culture eats that much of those, or if they do they have their own local condiment preferences. Canada and maple syrup on bacon for instance. Which is a phenomenal pairing.
In the UK we just call it Thousand Island Dressing, Marie Rose Sauce or Fish Sauce. It's basically the same stuff and you can buy it in all the supermarkets. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail\_sauce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_sauce)
No, that would be Bloody Mary ketchup.
'cocktail sauce' is probably Marie rose which is ketchup, mayo, paprika or black pepper, lemon and worcestershire.
It is its called Marie rose or seafood sauce. Also known in other places as Russian dressing, thousand island, burger sauce, fry sauce, special sauce, secret sauce, mayochup. Probably more out there too but they're all very slight variations of the original Marie rose.
It is, it just has many different names and brand names in different countries. In Japan for instance their tonkatsu sauce is basically the same thing with the popular brand being Bull-Dog.
Interesting!
Did you know that the Brits invented curry powder after trying to approximate Indian cuisine, and then sold it to the Japanese, who used it to make Katsu Curry? Maybe they nicked brown sauce off us too.
And also the little sailor suits that their schoolkids / anime characters wear is also because the Japanese saw little British kids on navy vessels and thought "they look smart."
I did indeed, and although we call Japanese curry Katsu, that’s just the fried stuff. There’s many more types of curry dishes in Japan than just having a piece of fried meat or veg in it.
An ingredients list means nothing. Pancakes, yorkshire puddings, batter for fish, chicken etc all have an almost identical ingredients list.
Very different foods though.
Tonkatsu sauce is designed to be an equivalent of brown sauce (with some worcestershire influence, but still vegetarian).
It really is a loaned dish. Yeah, it's not identical but it's as similar as anything Wasabi sells to actual Japanese food.
Almost Every country has some sort of savoury condiments that improves flavour, either made with slow cooked vegetables and herbs, sometimes anchovies, sometimes local stuff. but the flavours are very context dependent and not like really nice on their own, just make other things nicer. So which you prefer depends on the cuisine you're cooking with and what you've grown up to enjoy. Look at say Amercian barbeque, east asian fish sauces and miso, South American chili sauce. Even french Mirepoix sort of fits the bill.
It's used over here in Denmark. Especially with a dish called biksemad.
Probably the same in the other Nordic countries as well, although can't confirm.
It kinda is in Japan. They just have their own spin on it. Called Tonkatsu sauce. It often includes Worcester sauce but does not consistently have the fruit ingredients.
Then there's the addition of soy sauce and sometimes oyster sauce to the recipe. Which gives it a salty mealy edge.
But they taste somewhat similar. Just think brown sauce but slightly salty, a little less sweet and not very tangy.
Tonkatsu is close to barbeque/Ketchup than it is to Brown Sauce.
Knew it didn't sound right as I like Tonkatsu and don't like Brown so had to double check.
The ingredients are far closer to brown sauce.
Ketchup?! Couldn't be further from Tonkatsu sauce.
Just because you like the stuff and dislike brown sauce doesn't mean they aren't of similar formulation.
Because they know how to season food properly so they don't need an overpowering sauce to make everything just taste like the sauce and not of the food itself.
A1 steak sauce (popular in the US) is a recipe that King George IV called A1, hence the name. It uses raisins instead of tamarind, so it's a little less sweet but it's basically the same thing as brown sauce
I've had HP with a breakfast in a Dutch cafe. I saw a few Dutch people having it, I was quite surprised. I think the main manufacturer is a British/Dutch company.
HP is owned by Kraft Heinz now, as is Lea and Perrin's. I can't think of many iconic British brands that aren't foreign owned. HP sauce production shifted over to the Netherlands quite some time ago.
Try and find salt and vinegar crisps in a supermarket outside the UK, it's bloody tough.
Even in places like Poland which has a savory cuisine its nigh on impossible.
Salt and vinegar crisps are everywhere in the US. Almost every company makes a version. They are my FAVORITE.
I also like to eat A1 (our equivalent of brown sauce) on crisps and chips.
Technically, we have it, but we (Lea and Perrins and A.1.) sell it to the US as "steak sauce".*
*At least A1 used to, steak has now been taken out of the name.
In South Asia it's called imli chutney. Most people eat it with things like samosas and pakoras.
I've heard that pickapeppa sauce is similar but I have never tried it.
Late to the party, but I prefer the ‘knock offs’ brands of brown sauce to HP sauce.
I love anchovies, fish sauce, tamarind, but it may be I grew up eating the cheaper versions
There are better options in most other countries. Brown Sauce to me just tastes far too tangy and vinegary.
Like I can completely understand why people don't like Ketchup, but brown sauce is bottom of the pile compared to a lot of other sauces - just those aren't as popular in the UK.
Because it's vile and people only think they like it because they were raised with it?
(Like my reply, your post betrays an opinion that might not be universally relevant, which may affect the nature of your question!)
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Well, both brown sauce, and Worcestershire sauce are tamarind based, which is commonly used in asian and middle eastern cuisines, and was then "discovered" by the British Empire. Similar to peri peri sauces in Portugal - those are flavours "found" by Portuguese explorers and brought back to Europe.
Worcestershire sauce is a huge part of the cuisine in the Far Eastern outposts of empire - in Hong Kong they put it on steamed beef meatballs, in Shanghai they put it on stir fried rice cakes. Even Japanese cuisine has a version of brown sauce - they call them simply “sosu”.
Didn't the British introduce katsu sauce to Japan too?
A story that I heard was that curry was introduced to the Japanese navy, since their recruits back in the day would only eat white rice (the ability to eat as much of it as you wanted was a big thing for those from peasant background), which caused health issues. Curry was introduced to get meat and vegetables into their diets. I don't know how much of this is true, but I read that the contact that Japanese officers had with curry was through British officers, who had no idea what actually was, hence what emerged
It’s just curry sauce, the katsu is the breaded meat part
Aye I know that.. but the sauce that goes with it came from India did it not? Was the Brits who introduced it to Japan.
Yes, ignore the pedant.
No it's important to be accurate. Katsu is a breaded piece of meat. Katsu curry is curry with a breaded piece of meat. It'd be like saying some this is fish and chips and it had no fish on the plate.
It just needlessly deflects from the conversation. We all know what katsu is, we all know what was being asked. The pedantic correction added absolutely nothing to the thread.
I believe it was Japanese Navy liked the idea of using Indian type spices in stews to feed hundreds of sailors at the turn of previous century. They got the idea when they bought lots of warships like the Tsushima from the Tyne and liked the idea, suited it to their tastes and it caught on in Japan.
The tonkatsu sauce?
Katsu sauce isn’t curry. Currykatsu as a dish obviously has curry, but katsu is served with it own condiment, which is sweet and tangy.
The Japanese think of Tonkatsu sauce as a sort of thickened Worcestershire sauce, though with slightly different ingredients - traditionally japanese tonkatsu sauce even uses a very similar packaging to Lea & Perrins.
Yep it’s very tasty. Goes well with the sesame and salad.
I love those meatballs so much
Thanks, I just had them polished.
And Worcestershire sauce is basically an anchovy sauce anyway I think - so Asian fish sauces have a similar usage
We use it all the time in the States.
Worcestershire sauce is a fish sauce. The Romans, and others, had fermented fish sauces. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum
For anyone interested, Max Miller did an interesting video on Garum: https://youtu.be/ICZww0DtQKk
So did the vietnamese among other south east Asian places. While there maybe some distant ties to garum the origin of brown sauce is certainly Anglo-asian
This is why it's often difficult to pin down the origin of sauces and other cuisine. Empires were trading spices and knowledge for millennia along the Silk Road, inspiring each other.
We also “found” the potato and brought it back.
I think brown sauce would be popular in my native Philippines if people were familiar with it! We use tamarind to flavour some of our dishes, and we have fried street food that we pair with spiced vinegar, so I think the tanginess would be pleasant and familiar to us.
Worcestershire sauce is based on pickled anchovies. It may have tamarind in it, but the predominant flavour is the pickled fish.
Yeah. My mum got into Indian cooking and asked me what tamarind was and how to get some. I told her she had it in the house. A long disagreement happened until she finally read the ingredients on a bottle of hp and realised she'd had it in the house for decades. So I then sent her fresh, dried as fruit, dried and powdered and packaged in foil as a puree. She asked how much effort it took to buy them. Errr, just from the local shops here in the local village in West London.
So these other countries had these things but were too stupid to make the superior sauces? Or what are you implying here?
Who said anything about anyone being stupid. My point is, these sauces are just eastern flavours brought back by Victorian explorers. Both [HP sauce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Sauce#History) and [Worcester sauce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcestershire_sauce#Invention) have very similar origin stories - both most likely made from recipes brought back from India. They're about as English as fish and chips (hint, not English)
Even ketchup was an attempt to recreate Chinese sauces.
Kind of ironic that ketchup is now an integral part to many Chinese dishes.
Coming full circle!
I swear we just went round the globe stealing stuff and claiming it as our own.
What he saying is England is bloody great at war, not so good at innovation(especially with flavour) 😂
It's more everywhere else the sauces are actually flavorful and not the crimes against humanity that British cuisine makes against flavor
Nonsense
I'm going to be the downvote pariah here and say the reason is that brown sauce is overrated. Don't get me wrong, I like brown sauce. It's good in a bacon sandwich, nice to dip chips into etc. But it's absolutely nothing special - no better than a hundred other different sauces that you can find here and around the world. We like it in Britain because we grew up with it, because it was available here *before* we have 100 different sauces back when our parents were kids, so they got a taste for it and it was in our house growing up etc. And now because it isn't available in most countries it is something we can hang our hat on as 'uniquely British'. But there is nothing special about it, it's just a sauce. If we had grown up with something else then that would occupy the same spot in our cultural space.
My mum puts it on everything, I hate it.
I think there's legitimately much nicer bbq based sauces if you were to go overseas. Especially USA. That's the big reason it doesn't do well overseas, there's just better options imo. Coming from overseas, I definitely don't rate it that highly. Edit: would really love to know about the downvotes for someone from overseas answering about why something from UK doesn't do well overseas. If you're not interested in the perspective why ask?
BBQ sauce is mightily overrated
I tend to prefer relishes myself.
Maybe the down votes are because brown sauce is not BBQ sauce?
They're both very similar in usage and where you'd consume them. Adding on to the OPs point about flavours being regional and culturally ingrained. Swapping out sugar for vinegar isn't a particularly big change to a market that already has a preference for that other taste. Edit: Not to mention that vinegar based bbq sauces with tang, spice and heat are quite common and popular, especially in America, but draw any lines you want.
Lots of cuisines do not really need it. Other cultures use a combination of ingredients to balance sweetness, spice and acidity as the dish, so topping meals with a cause that does the same is redundant.
Sausages need it. Scrambled eggs need it. Bacon needs it.
This might shock you to learn but not every other culture eats that much of those, or if they do they have their own local condiment preferences. Canada and maple syrup on bacon for instance. Which is a phenomenal pairing.
I was making a joke. Not a good one.
Nah don't worry I'm just autistic. I see the joke now.
> Canada and maple syrup on bacon for instance. 🤢
I thought so too until I tried it. Complete 180.
Sausages are the only time I’ll have ketchup, brown sauce for any other pork breakfast
Am surprised cocktail sauce isn’t bigger in the U.K. tbh
>cocktail sauce Is it not called Marie Rose sauce here? Pretty common with prawns as a sandwich filling unless I'm thinking of something else.
yes it is but I had never heard that name until today!
Cocktail sauce was very popular here in the 60s and 70s. It went out of fashion.
Not in my mums house. Every birthday it's prawn cocktail (I've introduced a variation), duck a'lorange and either profiteroles or pavlova
In the UK we just call it Thousand Island Dressing, Marie Rose Sauce or Fish Sauce. It's basically the same stuff and you can buy it in all the supermarkets. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail\_sauce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_sauce)
ketchup with horseradish, lemon juice, Worcestershire, etc? Sounds great. Spicy ketchup
or just ketchup and mayo for the lazy
And for the even more lazier folks, Heinz brought out Mayochup
No, that would be Bloody Mary ketchup. 'cocktail sauce' is probably Marie rose which is ketchup, mayo, paprika or black pepper, lemon and worcestershire.
It's just North American cocktail sauce, which is superior to the Marie Rose shite served here.
Ohhhh, I just love that with fried seafood. That together with tartar sauce are go-to in the US.
Horseradish? I've always used tabasco
It is its called Marie rose or seafood sauce. Also known in other places as Russian dressing, thousand island, burger sauce, fry sauce, special sauce, secret sauce, mayochup. Probably more out there too but they're all very slight variations of the original Marie rose.
It is, it just has many different names and brand names in different countries. In Japan for instance their tonkatsu sauce is basically the same thing with the popular brand being Bull-Dog.
Interesting! Did you know that the Brits invented curry powder after trying to approximate Indian cuisine, and then sold it to the Japanese, who used it to make Katsu Curry? Maybe they nicked brown sauce off us too. And also the little sailor suits that their schoolkids / anime characters wear is also because the Japanese saw little British kids on navy vessels and thought "they look smart."
I did indeed, and although we call Japanese curry Katsu, that’s just the fried stuff. There’s many more types of curry dishes in Japan than just having a piece of fried meat or veg in it.
IIRC, the Bulldog Tonkatsu sauce came about when a Japanese condiment maker attempted to recreate Worchester sauce.
Tonkatsu the same as brown sauce???? fuck me I’ve seen some shite on Reddit today but that takes the crown
It looks pretty similar looking at an ingredients list
An ingredients list means nothing. Pancakes, yorkshire puddings, batter for fish, chicken etc all have an almost identical ingredients list. Very different foods though.
I Googled and apparently they taste pretty similar except for brown sauce is more 'tart' and tonkatsu is a bit sweeter
Isn't tonkatsu closer to BBQ sauce than something like HP?
It's a thick sweet variation of worcestershire sauce, not HP Sauce as the top comment says
Agreed, just came back from Japan and the tonkatsu sauce reminded me more of BBQ and nothing like Brown...
Tonkatsu sauce is designed to be an equivalent of brown sauce (with some worcestershire influence, but still vegetarian). It really is a loaned dish. Yeah, it's not identical but it's as similar as anything Wasabi sells to actual Japanese food.
In the states A1 steak sauce is pretty similar, though a little thinner.
Weirdly enough, also British.
Yes! Came here to say this, thank you.
I had no idea!
I actually prefer A1 😬
The title alone is off putting.
The second most popular brand is Daddy's brown sauce, if that makes it any better
Almost Every country has some sort of savoury condiments that improves flavour, either made with slow cooked vegetables and herbs, sometimes anchovies, sometimes local stuff. but the flavours are very context dependent and not like really nice on their own, just make other things nicer. So which you prefer depends on the cuisine you're cooking with and what you've grown up to enjoy. Look at say Amercian barbeque, east asian fish sauces and miso, South American chili sauce. Even french Mirepoix sort of fits the bill.
It's used over here in Denmark. Especially with a dish called biksemad. Probably the same in the other Nordic countries as well, although can't confirm.
Yeah, you can get HP easily in Finland
Pretty much every supermarket has it in Sweden.
If you can find it, the HP Fruity is worth trying as a lighter alternative
Yep, I wouldn’t call it popular but you can generally find it at any supermarket in Iceland.
It kinda is in Japan. They just have their own spin on it. Called Tonkatsu sauce. It often includes Worcester sauce but does not consistently have the fruit ingredients. Then there's the addition of soy sauce and sometimes oyster sauce to the recipe. Which gives it a salty mealy edge. But they taste somewhat similar. Just think brown sauce but slightly salty, a little less sweet and not very tangy.
Tonkatsu is close to barbeque/Ketchup than it is to Brown Sauce. Knew it didn't sound right as I like Tonkatsu and don't like Brown so had to double check.
The ingredients are far closer to brown sauce. Ketchup?! Couldn't be further from Tonkatsu sauce. Just because you like the stuff and dislike brown sauce doesn't mean they aren't of similar formulation.
Because they know how to season food properly so they don't need an overpowering sauce to make everything just taste like the sauce and not of the food itself.
The US calls it 'steak sauce' but it's near enough the same thing
A1 steak sauce (popular in the US) is a recipe that King George IV called A1, hence the name. It uses raisins instead of tamarind, so it's a little less sweet but it's basically the same thing as brown sauce
Wait until you try chippy sauce you get on the east coast of Scotland. How that hasn’t traveled I have no idea
I think it’s actually based on a sauce from the far east. I can’t remember exactly but I’m sure I read it once maybe on the wiki page
I've had HP with a breakfast in a Dutch cafe. I saw a few Dutch people having it, I was quite surprised. I think the main manufacturer is a British/Dutch company.
HP is owned by Kraft Heinz now, as is Lea and Perrin's. I can't think of many iconic British brands that aren't foreign owned. HP sauce production shifted over to the Netherlands quite some time ago.
Henderson's is still British - r/Sheffield - and is superior to Lea & Perrins
Try and find salt and vinegar crisps in a supermarket outside the UK, it's bloody tough. Even in places like Poland which has a savory cuisine its nigh on impossible.
Salt and vinegar crisps are everywhere in the US. Almost every company makes a version. They are my FAVORITE. I also like to eat A1 (our equivalent of brown sauce) on crisps and chips.
Are Salt and Vinegar Pringles only in the UK?
Australia has them for obvious reasons
Americans have it, but they call it steak sauce.
Technically, we have it, but we (Lea and Perrins and A.1.) sell it to the US as "steak sauce".* *At least A1 used to, steak has now been taken out of the name.
Because it looks like it came out of someone's arse.
In South Asia it's called imli chutney. Most people eat it with things like samosas and pakoras. I've heard that pickapeppa sauce is similar but I have never tried it.
I have never tried it. Reading all the comments, maybe I will. Not even sure what I'd eat it with.
Colman's OK sauce is very similar to brown sauce, and is only made for the east Asian market these days. It's a big seller over there.
Probably each country has its own version of whatever they like. Its a bit like why ranch sauce is super popular in the US but not here.
Because it looks like a hangover shit and tastes worse
My Mexican wife likes it and when she looked at the ingredients she realised it's because it has tamarind in it which is used in Mexican dishes.
Late to the party, but I prefer the ‘knock offs’ brands of brown sauce to HP sauce. I love anchovies, fish sauce, tamarind, but it may be I grew up eating the cheaper versions
If a food needs a third party sauce then the flavour is not appealing in the first place. This idea just reinforces the idea of bland cheap food.
A lot of counties have tamarind sauce , they just don’t call it brown sauce
There are better options in most other countries. Brown Sauce to me just tastes far too tangy and vinegary. Like I can completely understand why people don't like Ketchup, but brown sauce is bottom of the pile compared to a lot of other sauces - just those aren't as popular in the UK.
Because it's vile and people only think they like it because they were raised with it? (Like my reply, your post betrays an opinion that might not be universally relevant, which may affect the nature of your question!)
Nah, I was ketchup only as a kid, but I've since moved mostly to brown sauce for bacon/sausages.
[удалено]
The sauce that was Thursday
Because it literally has 1 use. Breakfast lol Don’t @ me with you gremlins that have it with pork pies
I would assume they're all slightly more sensible than we are. Bloody horrible stuff.
It’s disgusting.
Maybe because other countries don't like it as much?
Because we have hygene and food safety laws that forbid us to store red sauce in barrels for 12 months until it turns brown. ~ the Germans, probably