Culture : Venerable British Sauce Is a Seasoned World Traveler : Worcestershire got its start by accident 156 years ago. But its success has been carefully planned.

“There’s always a delicious smell around here,” the taxi driver said as he braked at the entrance archway of Lea & Perrins’ Victorian red-brick factory in this historic Midlands city.

Indeed, the visitor is almost overwhelmed by the aroma: tangy, exotic, spicy, redolent of mysterious climes. It is the smell of Britain’s world-famed export: The Original and Genuine Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce.

To enter the factory’s covered courtyard is to journey back through time and space, to see workers wrestling with barrels of incoming shallots, garlic, onions, anchovies, chilies, tamarinds and vinegar.

These are the essential ingredients of Worcestershire Sauce, which will mature for three years before being blended. The exact proportions of the sauce are a closely held secret known only to four people here in the plant.

“Only myself, the production chief, the sauce supervisor and the head maker know the formula,” said Jim Garnett, the general manager and a 25-year veteran with the company. “But to tell you the truth, the real secret is time--and care. We’ve put 150 years of care into making Worcestershire Sauce.”

About 25 million liters of Worcestershire Sauce are consumed each year in 140 countries around the world; how many millions of Bloody Marys are seasoned with the sauce is left to the imagination.

But the Lea & Perrins people, who have always been expert merchandisers, encourage customers to use Worcestershire Sauce on a wide variety of foods--meats, poultry, stews, eggs, gravies, barbecues--and provide recipes. There’s even one for Bloody Mary ice cream.

Warming to the subject, Garnett said: “Our sauce is unique. Add it to a Bloody Mary, and you can taste the Worcestershire clearly. Add it to cooking, and you don’t taste the sauce, but it enhances the flavor. We sell a lot of sauce to the Japanese, who use it as a sushi dip, and they say it ‘creates deliciousness.’ ”

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The Worcestershire story began about 1835 when Lord Sandys, who had been governor of Bengal, brought a recipe for a piquant sauce from India home to a couple of local druggists named John Lea and William Perrins, who were asked to make up a batch.

The two clever merchants provided Sandys with his recipe but kept another batch for themselves. When they first tasted the sauce, they found it unpalatable, and they consigned it in stone jars to the cellar.

A few years later, they rediscovered the jars, and before throwing the batch out, sampled it again. Eureka! The sauce had matured and had a superb taste.

Starting with a few casks, Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce was first sold commercially in 1837. It was an immediate success--partly because, unlike the run of brown sauces, it could be stored indefinitely and didn’t go bad in hot climates or while traveling.

By 1843, the two druggists were selling nearly 15,000 bottles a year.

Lea & Perrins salesmen were particularly adept at getting ship stewards in the ports of Liverpool, Southhampton and London to take it aboard for long voyages, where the sauce improved the quality of the deteriorating foodstuffs after weeks at sea.

Thus Worcestershire Sauce soon showed up in many a faraway place: Alaska, the Himalayas, Antarctica.

Today, Barnett enjoys taking visitors into the factory’s Dickensian, walk-in safe, which houses the company archives, to recall Lea & Perrins lore:

* By 1849, Lea & Perrins had rounded Cape Horn, with Worcestershire Sauce being delivered to San Francisco for Gold Rush miners.

* Worcestershire Sauce was taken on wagon trains of the Wild West as a condiment, and Indians who acquired bottles used it to paint their faces.

* A soldier in the Boer War wrote home after the Battle of Rorke’s Drift in 1879, recounting how he used the sauce to liven up the army diet of tough bully beef.

* When Colonel Younghusband made his pioneering visit to the forbidden city of Lhasa in Tibet in 1903, he found a bottle of Lea & Perrins on the refectory table of an order of monks.

* A city in New Zealand called Te Wairoa was buried in a volcanic eruption in 1886. When it was recently excavated, a bottle of Worcestershire Sauce was found embedded in volcanic rock.

* A bottle was on the table when Britain’s Neville Chamberlain held his discussions with Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini and France’s Edouard Daladier.

* The great American baseball pitcher, Dizzy Dean, reported that he ate eggs each morning flavored with the sauce.

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As its renown widened, Worcestershire Sauce attracted a number of imitators--so many that in 1906, Lea & Perrins obtained a court ruling that only their product would be allowed to carry the words “Original and Genuine,” which is still printed on every bottle.

The sauce is still matured and bottled on the same premises that the company has occupied since 1897. But over the years, the company left family hands and is now owned by the French grocery giant, BSN. It is also bottled in the U.S. with concentrate and formulas created in Worcester.

The raw materials arrive here--anchovies from Spain, tamarinds from Calcutta, chilies from China--and are stored in vaults in plastic barrels, which have replaced the old oak casks, for three years. The ingredients are steeped in brine as the solids break down and mature. “This allows the flavor to develop,” said Garnett.

After maturing, the ingredients are transferred to 20-foot-tall, fiberglass holding tanks in the “making house,” where they are stirred regularly. Then everything is shifted into the mixing tank--a process that takes three months overall.

“There’s no fermentation, no cooking, no preservatives, and at this point we have a product that looks, smells and tastes like Worcestershire Sauce, though much thicker,” Garnett explained.

The last step is to thin and blend the sauce with sugar, salt and vinegar for bottling, after pasteurization, into 5-ounce, 10-ounce and 20-ounce sizes, at a peak rate of 100,000 a day.

Worcestershire Sauce continues to do a booming business, even though other sauces can use the name Worcestershire. (Worcestershire, pronounced “woos-ter-sheer,” is the County of Worcester.)

And while the company doesn’t break down profit figures for the sauce alone, London officials said: “We are doing extremely well. We dominate the market.”

No batch of the sauce is deemed ready for bottling until the head maker, an Italian immigrant named Orazio Derosa, declares that it has reached the correct level of piquancy.

As for that moment of magic--the result of which has titillated taste buds the world over--Jim Garnett mused: “Even we are not quite sure how it works. But it does.”

Worcestershire Sauce Savory Ice

(Bloody Mary Ice Cream)

Serves 4 to 6

6 tomatoes, skinned, deseeded, chopped

1/2 pint tomato juice

4 tablespoons of vodka

2 tablespoons of Worcestershire Sauce

1/4 pint creme fraiche

2 egg yolks

1 clove garlic, crushed and chopped

salt and freshly ground pepper

twist of lemon, basil or mint for garnish

In a bowl, blend egg yolks, creme fraiche, tomato juice, vodka, Worcestershire Sauce, garlic, salt and pepper. Freeze in a flat container until ice crystals start to form around the edges. Remove and beat until smooth. Add the chopped tomato and freeze until firm.

Serve as an appetizer, in scoops with a twist of lemon or a spring of basil or mint.