Pass the sauce

Reflecting on my ramblings last week about the monks in America running a flourishing coffee company, it occurred to me that centuries ago, many religious orders were involved in business ventures.

Catholic monks in France were particularly innovative in producing the most delectable liqueurs, such as Benedictine and Chartreuse. And while the best known monk brand in the world, Dom Perignon, has been erroneously credited with developing that now very expensive bubbly of the same name, Dom Perignon did in fact achieve something a lot grander by inventing champagne itself. Italian brothers have also invented some delicious liqueurs, such as my favourite: Frangelico.

Have English monks made any significant contribution to the culinary world? Certainly not a liqueur or wine or even whisky. They surely realised that even in the Middle Ages they had no chance in competing with the Scots, Irish and Europeans. But they must surely have contributed something to the whole process of eating and drinking.

Now from here on, my story could well be urban legend and therefore pure fiction, but I like to believe it anyway. Particularly as I must confess to making it up after noticing just how many cooking programmers on television these days go on about growing, harvesting, shopping for, preparing, garnishing, serving and eating food. But not much about who invented so much of this stuff we trustingly swallow every day.

I’d like to know what was going through the mind of that fellow who first decided to milk a cow. And who, in heaven’s name, thought of putting together on a plate a chicken’s ovum and a slimly sliced sliver of pig’s backside, expecting one third of mankind to eat it before having woken up properly?

But to return to my story about the English contribution to the culinary arts. It all started when I read the the ingredients listed on a bottle of Lea & Perrins’ “original and genuine” Worcestershire sauce. It begged debate on how every single meal served in Britain for heaven knows how long has not passed a single lip without the addition of this miracle concoction of vinegar, molasses, sugar, salt, anchovies, tamarinds, onions, garlic and a host of secret flavourings and spices.

Picture the scene. An olde English inn a couple of hundred years ago. Two novice monks travelling back to their monastery from a three-month retreat in the north, Brothers Fred Lea and Percy Perrins, pop in for a midday meal.

“Oi!” said Br Fred to the comely waitress, “call this boiled beef? Nay lass, ‘tis putrefaction personified. Bring hither something to lay waste this ghastly taste!”
He tried some vinegar. Much too sour. His lips looked like a startled sea-anemone.
“‘Ere Fred lad, bung on some of this molasses, that’ll sweeten it up summat,” said Br Percy.

Still too tart, so he added a tablespoon of sugar. Then a pinch of salt for no reason other than it being so typically British. Didn’t help. From the corner of the room a swarthy seaman from Lisbon said: “Ifa-you don’t gotta no pawpsh, banansh or pineapsh, try sardinsh…”

No fruit or sardines being available, Fred bunged in a mushed up anchovy. Still no joy. The innkeeper brought out a little hessian bag of tamarind seeds he’d won off a Nigerian minstrel in the previous year’s whist marathon. No-one had any idea what they were, but they went into the pot, just for the heck of it.

The coup de grâce came quite predictably from a gnarled French hunchback alternately sipping mead at the bar.

“Alors, m’sieu. When ve in la belle France try to eat sumzing zat is not yet dead, ve add ze garlic.” So, in went a clove of garlic on the basis that if it worked on living organisms, then it would work on those long gone.

The innkeeper came back with an armful of sample flavourants and spices left by decades of travelling condiment salesmen and dumped the whole catastrophe into the mixture that was now looking like liquefied axle grease from a long-distance hansom cab.
Br Fred poured it over his over-boiled beef, hacked off a chunk and popped it in his mouth.
“Gad, Perrins,” he cried, “I can’t taste the meat at all anymore!”

And ever since, millions of visiting gourmets have been eternally grateful.

It was that at that moment, I like to believe, that the Good Lord decided that these two novices had so good a chance of wiping out entire monasteries and religious orders through their cavalier gastronomical experiments, that he guided them into industry instead.