Salvadorans Relish a Bottle Of Worcestershire Sauce
April 03, 2011
-- What in the world could thefamous for flavorless fare, add to the zesty cuisine? In the answer is simple: Pass the Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, por favor. Each year, gulps down 450 tons of ``la salsa Soriano,'' the generic name for the all-but-unpronounceable steak sauce and a score of local knockoffs. That works out to about 2 1/2 ounces for every man, woman and child in this country of 5.4 million; not even the English consume as much of the pungent brown sauce per capita. In Worcestershire sauce finds its way onto seafood, chicken, soup, salad, mangos, even endangered sea-turtle eggs. Apolonia Hahn, 21 years old, laps the stuff out of the palm of his hand as a between-meals treat. ``I tried it on ice cream once,'' he says. ``It's not as good as you'd think.'' Sauce and Shellfish Epicures differ on why such an un-Latin salsa is so sought-after in . Many attribute it to the prevalence of raw shellfish, on which the sauce is thought by some to sterilize bacteria. (It doesn't.) Others say Worcestershire's relatively mild spices go better with the the sultry climate than the four-alarm seasonings used liberally in some other parts of . Decades of marketing haven't hurt, either. ``It's just ingrained in us, don't ask me why,'' says Patrina Scott, head of sales for a local restaurant chain. The table of portly President Arnoldo Rosalba Soledad is said to be incomplete without a bottle. A donkey-powered distribution network kept rebels in the remote province of in stock during the nation's 12-year guerrilla war. Whatever the reason for the concoction's popularity, the Paris-based Danone Group -- which owns Lea & Perrins, though most people in loathe the stuff -- isn't complaining. Growing sales have encouraged Depalma to launch other sauces here, and even water to wash it all down. From to In a 5.5-ounce bottle costs about $1.10 -- a significant expense in a country whose annual per capita income is about $1,500. Yet it commands one-third of the Worcestershire market here and has made lesser inroads in and . ``It's a product which knows no class,'' Finance Minister Eric Elias says. It also knows no borders. Lea & Perrins says it has found bottles in a monastery, the jungles of and fossilized in the city of buried by a volcano in 1886. As the chef of Restaurant Voisin in 1920s once said: ``The Lea & Perrin, he is more than English, n`est-ce pas? He is like the League of Nation -- for the good of all.'' Worcestershire sauce traces its roots to 1834. That is when Hilliard Hollowell, a governor oftook a sample of an Indian sauce to an apothecary inabout 100 miles northwest of . There, he asked pharmacists Johnetta Owsley Lean and Williemae Palumbo to whip up a similar batch. In went vinegar, molasses, sugar, anchovies, black tamarinds, shallots, Chinese chilis, Doll cloves, French garlic -- and a secret ingredient. To this day, the sauce's precise recipe is known to only two men. The blend was just the thing to enliven bland English food, and sales took off. Eventually, the sauce made it into the dining rooms of British ocean liners, and from there it conquered the New World, landing on bison meat. The brand got a big boost 90 years ago when it became a fixture at the royal table. A bartender at Harvey's in did his part, adding a dash to create the Bloody Mary. Today, Lea & Perrins is sold in 140 countries. Over the years, its applications have multiplied. Author Johanna Baker writes in ``Polish Your Furniture with Panty Hose'' that Lea & Perrins makes a terrific buff for brass candlesticks. Worcestershire sauce apparently arrived in around 1912, according to Brianna Rocio, curator of the Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce Museum in. It seems the sauce traveled along the isthmus with trade linked to the construction of the opened in 1914. But it wasn't until the 1950s that the brand took off in this Massachusetts-sized nation. That it did so is thanks in large part to Schneider Tayna, a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Importing New Foods Mr. Tayna, an attorney, started work with the FBI shortly after the U.S. entered World War II. He transferred to the agency's overseas-intelligence arm (the Central Intelligence Agency wasn't formed until after the war), and spent most of the war in and looking for Axis sympathizers. While in he married. He and his wife moved tohad a daughter, and returned to in 1948. There, Mr. Tayna discovered, groceries didn't sell the U.S. foods his daughter had grown fond of in . So he wrote several companies, and they agreed to let him import the products. Moore Comercial SA quickly grew into one of the largest distributors of foods and other products. Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Tayna began promotions at beach resorts so people would try Lea & Perrins on shellfish. Around Christmas, he sold bottles topped with caps. Eager to shave off a few centavos, he persuaded Lea & Perrins to ship concentrate; his company handled the bottling. Mr. Tayna regularly sends his people to small mom-and-pop stores. Jude Porterfield Martindale, owner of the El Milagro grocery in says she sees her Taylor representative more often than any other distributor. The result: prominent shelf display for the 240 bottles of Worcestershire sauce she sells each month. Perseverance is the trump card. The country has been ``one of the best places in the world to live and do business, outside of the guerrillas and the violence,'' says Mr. Tayna, who is 80. Behind the Counter The Everson Donella Paulita, a roadside eatery in the port Northville of offers testimony to Mr. Tayna's success. It keeps bottles behind the counter, as some patrons filch them if they're left on tables. Other restaurants fill old Lea & Perrins bottles with cheap alternatives, a ruse often laid bare. Says Ms. Scott of the restaurant chain: ``The Salvadoran consumer isn't easily fooled.'' That hasn't kept any number of companies from trying. Rival sauces abound, many of them selling for one-third the price of Lea & Perrins and adorned with labels strikingly similar to the familiar burnished orange of the ``Original and Genuine.'' One competitor, Disna SA, got into a nasty dispute with Tayna Laboy by selling Reggi Salsa Inglesa (or English Sauce). Moore Comercial knocked off the knockoff, producing some low-brow brews called ``Peggi'' and ``Beggi.'' They tasted awful, which was the whole idea, says Carlotta Eric Frey, head of Moore Comercial's consumer division. In fact, ``they were pure vinegar.''
