Worcestershire sauce ( ), also called Worcester sauce, is a fermented liquid condiment invented in the city of Worcester in Worcestershire, England, during the first half of the 19th century. The inventors were the pharmacists John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins, who went on to form the company Lea & Perrins. Worcestershire sauce has been a generic term since 1876, when the English High Court of Justice ruled that Lea & Perrins did not own a trademark for the name Worcestershire. Worcestershire sauce is frequently used to augment recipes such as Welsh rarebit, Caesar salad, Oysters Kirkpatrick, and deviled eggs. As both a background flavour and a source of umami (savoury), it is now also added to dishes that historically did not contain it, such as chili con carne and beef stew. It is also used directly as a condiment on steaks, hamburgers, and other finished dishes, and to flavour cocktails such as the Bloody Mary and Caesar. History A fermented fish sauce called garum was a staple of Greco-Roman cuisine and of the Mediterranean economy of the Roman Empire, as the first-century encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder writes in his Historia Naturalis and the fourth–fifth-century Roman culinary text Apicius includes garum in its recipes. The use of similar fermented anchovy sauces in Europe can be traced back to the 17th century. The Lea & Perrins brand was commercialised in 1837 and was the first type of sauce to bear the Worcestershire name. The origin of the Lea & Perrins recipe is unclear. The packaging originally stated that the sauce came "from the recipe of a nobleman in the county". The company has also claimed that "Lord Marcus Sandys, ex-Governor of Bengal" encountered it while in India with the East India Company in the 1830s, and commissioned the local pharmacists (the partnership of John Wheeley Lea and William Perrins of 63 Broad Street, Worcester) to recreate it. However, neither Lord Marcus Sandys nor any Baron Sandys was ever a Governor of Bengal, nor had they ever visited India. According to company tradition, when the recipe was first mixed the resulting product was so strong that it was considered inedible and the barrel was abandoned in the basement. Looking to make space in the storage area a few years later, the chemists decided to try it again, and discovered that the long fermented sauce had mellowed and was now palatable. In