Family Recipe: English Sauce

I have a very old recipe for English Sauce, otherwise commonly known as Worchestershire Sauce. It’s strange, isn’t it? It’s strange that my family has a recipe for that and we are Chinese – Straits Chinese, I mean.

Since the British post-colonial war in Malaya different culinary cultures inter-mingling with one another is not uncommon, much less strange as it is a part of a daily meal. This sauce is best eaten with Enche Cabin fried chicken, a recipe I will post on this blog some day, as dipping sauce.

To show you how old this recipe is, I have a pictorial evidence of the recipe written haphazardly by my grandaunt, paternal-side, who is a pretty good cook. She’s a very unique character; a feminist and a challenger of traditions as a young woman whose picture of her in a suit and tie brought cringes and sighs from the elders but chuckles today. Even so, her bold style did not deter her from the kitchen. Cooking has always been a skill she reluctantly takes credit for in a very love-hate manner. At 86, she’s still as feisty as ever and her Sugee Cake is still pretty much sought after by our family. Anyway, she keeps her bunch of recipes in a biscuit tin circa 1950s in pieces of paper, written in blue, black and sometimes red ink.

The recipe uses mixture of old Southeast Asian Chinese measurements and since some words were written in how she would understand an ingredient, I will do some translation for you.

1 tahil = 37.799 grams
1 kati /catty = 500grams/1.1lb

To be grounded into a fine powder (use coffee grinder or buy these in powder form in your local supermarkets):

5 nutmegs
5 star anise
20 cloves
3 inches cinnamon sticks

I asked my grandaunt what 1 bottle meant, she said it’s equivalent to the coca-cola bottles in “those days”. Those days, my grandparents would order crates of soft drinks to store in the old house and the bottles all looked like these:Each of these bottles carry 240ml of liquid weight.

So to continue with our English sauce recipe, it’s 240ml of water and 240ml of rice vinegar.

1 small tin of Colman’s mustard powder: The smallest tin I can find was 4oz. My grandaunt did not tell me how small was small unfortunately but this is for a very large amount of English Sauce. So 4oz (1/2 cup) seems like a reasonable amount.

1 bottle of soy sauce – 240ml. I know it was written as white sauce but it’s actually light soy sauce; direct translations don’t always come out right.

500grams of sugar and..

this is where I think a self-supervised adjustment needs to be made. Two catties of black pepper do not sound right because that’s 1kg of black pepper powder. We’re not making gun powder here and upon asking my grandaunt, she admittedly said that we would need to adjust the pepper to our taste. So start with 1/4 cup worth and then add a tablespoon at a time until it reaches the right bitiness.

When all these ingredients are ready, just mixed them in together well. Be careful when you add the mustard powder in though. It’s like an atom bomb to the nostrils.

I’ve yet to try this recipe for myself but I will one day. I thought I should share first.

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