Love it or loathe it, HP Sauce is part of our culinary heritage, says Liz Marcy.
HP Sauce was invented at the end of the 19th century by Mr FG Garton, a Nottingham grocer. He was down on his luck and couldn't pay his bills, so when Edwin Samson Moore, owner of the Midland Vinegar Company, offered to cancel his debt with the company and pay him £150 for the recipe, plus the use of the name HP, Garton jumped at the chance.
Moore had been looking around for some time for a sauce to manufacture and market. He liked both the taste and the name of Garton's HP Sauce, which had an appropriately patriotic ring to it. The HP stood for Houses of Parliament, as it was rumoured that the sauce had been seen gracing the tables of one of the dining rooms there.
The chutneys and sauces used to enliven the unimaginative diet of the time were traditionally made at home. But their expensive and exotic ingredients, and the lengthy preparation involved in doing this meant that they were beyond the reach of most people. So by putting HP Sauce onto the market in 1903 (the launch was delayed by the death of Queen Victoria), the company was bringing a privilege enjoyed by the rich to the tables of the masses.
Bottled sauces came into their own during wartime and other periods of shortage. They were sold to housewives as the answer to making leftovers and inferior cuts of meat more palatable - whatever the difficulties of obtaining some of the sauce's more exotic ingredients, such as dates, during wartime might have been.
As HP Sauce has always been more closely associated with hot chips than haute cuisine, it's as close as many people might get to tamarind, that sour flavouring beloved of fusion chefs. But who knows? Perhaps the Next Big Thing will be for chefs to incorporate the sauce into startling combinations to grace fashionable tables. HP ice cream, anybody?