Culinary Lesson

For dinner this evening, I planned to make our favorite dish. Its the ultimate in comfort food - a bowl of creamy, slightly cheesey mashed potatoes with peppers and steak folded in. Its fantastic, and we even fight over the leftovers. This will be my first attempt at this dish in Shanghai, but today has been a confidence-building day so I went to the grocery store assured that I could find everything I need.

Sirloin?
Check

Scallions?
Check

Sharp cheddar?
Check

Worchestershire Sauce?
Nope

Who would have thought? I figured that this most British of sauces would be anywhere that had ever been colonized, and certainly in any Western food store.

But no. None of the employees were familiar, and I scanned every shelf in the store to no avail.

I came home and went directly to the internet. Living in this backwater, I thought, I must figure everything out for myself. There must be some substitute for worchestershire that can be found in this God-forsaken city.

Actually, I kind of wrote that to be dramatic. It has been a really good day, and God-saken never crossed my mind.

Turns out, Worchestershire is of Asian origins and probably wasn't at the store because its ingredients were instead. A little lesson on Worchestershire:

What is now called “Worcestershire Sauce” owes its origin to British imperialism and its colonization of India. Despite its English-sounding name, Worcestershire sauce was originally an Indian recipe. It was brought back to Britain in 1835 by Lord Marcus Sandys, the ex-governor of Bengal. The sauce has as one of its basic ingredients the Indian spice called tamarind.
Tamarind is a seed whose taste combines the sweet with the sour. Traditional Worcestershire Sauce combines tamarind and soy sauce, with a little cinnamon and cloves.
Asian markets sell tamarind paste. Home-made Worcestershire Sauce combines the tamarind paste with soy sauce, and it includes small amounts of cinnamon, cloves, allspice, lemon grass and ground cardamom.

So, as Asian markets abound in our neighborhood and soy sauce is readily available, we should have no trouble fixing our favorite dish. And I should think twice before complaining about the availability of the products I rely upon.