Worcestershire sauce | The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails

is a pungent bottled vinegar-based condiment flavored with anchovies, tamarinds, and spices that has seen occasional use in mixing drinks since the late nineteenth century; today, it is principally found in the Bloody Mary and its derivatives. Worcestershire sauce was invented in the English city of Worcester by John Wheely Lea and William Perrins, a pair of local apothecaries, and introduced to market in 1838. It first found its way behind the bar in the 1880s, as an added touch in the Prairie Oyster, a raw egg seasoned with salt, pepper, and vinegar and drunk from a cocktail glass, and then in the Oyster Cocktail, which was roughly the same but with a real oyster. From there the condiment was rapidly adopted as a hangover cure, drunk straight (or, as the composer Victor Herbert took it, sprinkled in champagne) and then, in the 1920s, found its home in the Tomato Juice Cocktail, which with the addition of gin or vodka became the aforementioned Bloody Mary.