Hawkshead Brown Sauce

250ml - Lake District, UK

Hawkshead Fruity Brown Sauce - this can make almost anything better!

Brown Sauce is the common name for this very versatile condiment. Though often called steak sauce, it is in fact good with anything meaty and/or hearty.

In 1895, a grocer named Frederick Gibson Garton, of Nottingham, invented the sauce we generically call brown sauce. As legend goes, Garton heard that a restaurant in Parliament was serving it. So, he named it HP, and this is why HP Brown Sauce has the Parliament Building on the label.

HP and A1 Steak Sauce are very similar. Their ingredients vary slightly, most likely to accommodate perceived local tastes.

Hawkshead's Fruity Brown Sauce is much like the original sauce, without the modern commercialized ingredients, like corn, fruit juice, or coloring. And Mark has removed the flours to make it a cleaner product.

To the nose, you get sweet vinegar and a touch of raisin.

To the mouth, you get a wild mix of flavors that aren't exactly identifiable.  It's more like a mix of familiar and not familiar.

There's a strong vinegar presence, and if you're not careful it will make you cough. It doesn't reach the level of painful, but you definitely know this sauce is tingly.

The top of the mouth, the middle of the tongue, and the sides of the tongue, all experience different pleasures. And in the end your mouth is alive with the aftertaste - it's different and it's fun!

If you read the list of ingredients, you'll imagine that you're tasting one or the other, but . . . Along with all these great flavors, there are little bits and pieces. It's not clear what they are, but they must be the raisins and dates.

For what initially feels like something not-so-interesting, Hawkshead Brown Sauce changes immediately after your first taste. By the sixth or seventh taste, you're wondering if your life (at least your eating life) has been transformed, and your imagination conjures up all sorts of travel adventures, mysteries, and culinary delights.

Considered the sauce of the working class, brown sauce clearly has a devoted following. Beyond topping a less-than-perfect cut of meat, consider a bacon sandwich (simply bread, bacon, and brown sauce), or the same with sausage. Try it on toasted cheese and tomato, in Shepherd's Pie, on French fries, and of course with the classic fry-up, the English Breakfast!

Hawkshead's version of the traditional English brown sauce was the BRONZE AWARD WINNER at the 2003 GREAT TASTE AWARDS in the UK. It is a rich dark fruity sauce, so good with a Great British Fry Up.