Why isn't brown sauce more popular in other countries?

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PiemasterUK@reddit

I'm going to be the downvote pariah here and say the reason is that brown sauce is overrated. Don't get me wrong, I like brown sauce. It's good in a bacon sandwich, nice to dip chips into etc. But it's absolutely nothing special - no better than a hundred other different sauces that you can find here and around the world. We like it in Britain because we grew up with it, because it was available here *before* we have 100 different sauces back when our parents were kids, so they got a taste for it and it was in our house growing up etc. But there is nothing special about it, it's just a sauce. If we had grown up with something else then that would occupy the same spot in our cultural space.

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thallazar@reddit

I think there's legitimately much nicer bbq based sauces if you were to go overseas. Especially USA. That's the big reason it doesn't do well overseas, there's just better options imo. Coming from overseas, I definitely don't rate it that highly.

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polyphuckin@reddit

Maybe the down votes are because brown sauce is not BBQ sauce?

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thallazar@reddit

They're both very similar in usage and where you'd consume them. Adding on to the OPs point about flavours being regional and culturally ingrained. Swapping out sugar for vinegar isn't a particularly big change to a market that already has a preference for that other taste.

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ftp123char@reddit

Year old comment, but there is no way brown sauce and BBQ sauce are even remotely similar to me. Who on earth is putting BBQ sauce on a bacon and egg roll, or BBQ sauce on chips from a chippy. Brown sauce fits a niche that no other sauce covers when you don’t like ketchup, that is breakfast food and chippy chips

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thallazar@reddit

This might shock you but basically anyone not from the UK would use bbq sauce on a bacon and egg roll or chips. You can literally get loaded fries from KFC right now in the UK that have bbq sauce. Also this whole backlash against the stark differences between the two and how they could never be mistaken for one another goes to show the general lack of UK knowledge on US bbq sauces, who have a multitude of different varieties based on the region, half of which are vinegar based. Ironic given the original question.

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Gooncapt@reddit

BBQ sauce is mightily overrated

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thallazar@reddit

I tend to prefer relishes myself.

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LordEmostache@reddit

I'll go one step further as a downvote pariah and say Brown Sauce is rank. In a world where tomato sauce exists, Brown Sauce is unnecessary.

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Marconi84@reddit

My mum puts it on everything, I hate it.

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shitehead_revisited@reddit

In the states A1 steak sauce is pretty similar, though a little thinner.

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Gone_For_Lunch@reddit

Weirdly enough, also British.

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shitehead_revisited@reddit

I had no idea!

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LuckyJack1664@reddit

Yes! Came here to say this, thank you.

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Bluffwatcher@reddit

I got a bottle from a company that imports it off Amazon UK, after hearing so much praise on forums for it over the years. When it arrived I tried it, like you say, it was just watery brown sauce. I hate brown sauce, haha.

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Successful_Fish4662@reddit

I actually prefer A1 😬

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Nedonomicon@reddit

A lot of counties have tamarind sauce , they just don’t call it brown sauce

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ReggieTMcMuffin@reddit

I've had HP with a breakfast in a Dutch cafe. I saw a few Dutch people having it, I was quite surprised. I think the main manufacturer is a British/Dutch company.

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emehen@reddit

HP is owned by Kraft Heinz now, as is Lea and Perrin's. I can't think of many iconic British brands that aren't foreign owned. HP sauce production shifted over to the Netherlands quite some time ago.

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E420CDI@reddit

Henderson's is still British - r/Sheffield - and is superior to Lea & Perrins

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Necio@reddit

If a food needs a third party sauce then the flavour is not appealing in the first place. This idea just reinforces the idea of bland cheap food.

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benjymous@reddit

Well, both brown sauce, and Worcestershire sauce are tamarind based, which is commonly used in asian and middle eastern cuisines, and was then "discovered" by the British Empire. Similar to peri peri sauces in Portugal - those are flavours "found" by Portuguese explorers and brought back to Europe.

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Dxsmith165@reddit

Worcestershire sauce is a huge part of the cuisine in the Far Eastern outposts of empire - in Hong Kong they put it on steamed beef meatballs, in Shanghai they put it on stir fried rice cakes. Even Japanese cuisine has a version of brown sauce - they call them simply “sosu”.

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bonkerz1888@reddit

Didn't the British introduce katsu sauce to Japan too?

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mazajh@reddit

It’s just curry sauce, the katsu is the breaded meat part

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barc0de@reddit

And Katsu is a japanified version of the word cutlet

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bonkerz1888@reddit

Aye I know that.. but the sauce that goes with it came from India did it not? Was the Brits who introduced it to Japan.

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more_beans_mrtaggart@reddit

Yes, ignore the pedant.

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GaijinFoot@reddit

No it's important to be accurate. Katsu is a breaded piece of meat. Katsu curry is curry with a breaded piece of meat. It'd be like saying some this is fish and chips and it had no fish on the plate.

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more_beans_mrtaggart@reddit

It just needlessly deflects from the conversation. We all know what katsu is, we all know what was being asked. The pedantic correction added absolutely nothing to the thread.

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josephdrybrough@reddit

The tonkatsu sauce?

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WeeklyThroat6648@reddit

I believe it was Japanese Navy liked the idea of using Indian type spices in stews to feed hundreds of sailors at the turn of previous century. They got the idea when they bought lots of warships like the Tsushima from the Tyne and liked the idea, suited it to their tastes and it caught on in Japan.

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hallerz87@reddit

Katsu sauce isn’t curry. Currykatsu as a dish obviously has curry, but katsu is served with it own condiment, which is sweet and tangy.

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Dxsmith165@reddit

The Japanese think of Tonkatsu sauce as a sort of thickened Worcestershire sauce, though with slightly different ingredients - traditionally japanese tonkatsu sauce even uses a very similar packaging to Lea & Perrins.

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hallerz87@reddit

Yep it’s very tasty. Goes well with the sesame and salad.

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canibalbarca@reddit

A story that I heard was that curry was introduced to the Japanese navy, since their recruits back in the day would only eat white rice (the ability to eat as much of it as you wanted was a big thing for those from peasant background), which caused health issues. Curry was introduced to get meat and vegetables into their diets. I don't know how much of this is true, but I read that the contact that Japanese officers had with curry was through British officers, who had no idea what actually was, hence what emerged

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LongrodVonHugedong86@reddit

And Worcestershire sauce is basically an anchovy sauce anyway I think - so Asian fish sauces have a similar usage

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NotDavid-Jatt@reddit

I love those meatballs so much

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space_absurdity@reddit

Thanks, I just had them polished.

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

We use it all the time in the States.

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Ok-Fox1262@reddit

Yeah. My mum got into Indian cooking and asked me what tamarind was and how to get some. I told her she had it in the house. A long disagreement happened until she finally read the ingredients on a bottle of hp and realised she'd had it in the house for decades. So I then sent her fresh, dried as fruit, dried and powdered and packaged in foil as a puree. She asked how much effort it took to buy them. Errr, just from the local shops here in the local village in West London.

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turbo_dude@reddit

So these other countries had these things but were too stupid to make the superior sauces? Or what are you implying here?

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MoaningTablespoon@reddit

It's more everywhere else the sauces are actually flavorful and not the crimes against humanity that British cuisine makes against flavor

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mancmadness@reddit

Rubbish

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benjymous@reddit

Who said anything about anyone being stupid. My point is, these sauces are just eastern flavours brought back by Victorian explorers. They're about as English as fish and chips (hint, not English)

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iwanttobeacavediver@reddit

Even ketchup was an attempt to recreate Chinese sauces.

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Savings-Spirit-3702@reddit

I swear we just went round the globe stealing stuff and claiming it as our own.

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EconomyFreakDust@reddit

That's the British Empire in a nutshell.

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AnnoyedHaddock@reddit

Kind of ironic that ketchup is now an integral part to many Chinese dishes.

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iwanttobeacavediver@reddit

Coming full circle!

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Disastrous_Pin7730@reddit

What he saying is England is bloody great at war, not so good at innovation(especially with flavour) 😂

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more_beans_mrtaggart@reddit

Worcestershire sauce is based on pickled anchovies. It may have tamarind in it, but the predominant flavour is the pickled fish.

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ArtistEngineer@reddit

Worcestershire sauce is a fish sauce. The Romans, and others, had fermented fish sauces. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum

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bonkerz1888@reddit

This is why it's often difficult to pin down the origin of sauces and other cuisine. Empires were trading spices and knowledge for millennia along the Silk Road, inspiring each other.

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damnation333@reddit

For anyone interested, Max Miller did an interesting video on Garum: https://youtu.be/ICZww0DtQKk

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Superb_Government_60@reddit

So did the vietnamese among other south east Asian places. While there maybe some distant ties to garum the origin of brown sauce is certainly Anglo-asian

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bonkerz1888@reddit

I hope you aren't suggesting brown sauce is actually Asian 😂

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Time_Pineapple4991@reddit

I think brown sauce would be popular in my native Philippines if people were familiar with it! We use tamarind to flavour some of our dishes, and we have fried street food that we pair with spiced vinegar, so I think the tanginess would be pleasant and familiar to us.

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Al-Calavicci@reddit

We also “found” the potato and brought it back.

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pajamakitten@reddit

Lots of cuisines do not really need it. Other cultures use a combination of ingredients to balance sweetness, spice and acidity as the dish, so topping meals with a cause that does the same is redundant.

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JoneseyP98@reddit

Sausages need it. Scrambled eggs need it. Bacon needs it.

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tttttfffff@reddit

Sausages are the only time I’ll have ketchup, brown sauce for any other pork breakfast

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thallazar@reddit

This might shock you to learn but not every other culture eats that much of those, or if they do they have their own local condiment preferences. Canada and maple syrup on bacon for instance. Which is a phenomenal pairing.

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Academic-Bug-4597@reddit

> Canada and maple syrup on bacon for instance. 🤢

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thallazar@reddit

I thought so too until I tried it. Complete 180.

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JoneseyP98@reddit

I was making a joke. Not a good one.

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thallazar@reddit

Nah don't worry I'm just autistic. I see the joke now.

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turbo_dude@reddit

Am surprised cocktail sauce isn’t bigger in the U.K. tbh

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Takingashit180923@reddit

It is its called Marie rose or seafood sauce. Also known in other places as Russian dressing, thousand island, burger sauce, fry sauce, special sauce, secret sauce, mayochup. Probably more out there too but they're all very slight variations of the original Marie rose.

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modumberator@reddit

ketchup with horseradish, lemon juice, Worcestershire, etc? Sounds great. Spicy ketchup

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turbo_dude@reddit

or just ketchup and mayo for the lazy

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wildgoldchai@reddit

And for the even more lazier folks, Heinz brought out Mayochup

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Sharo_77@reddit

Horseradish? I've always used tabasco

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Wi1dLou@reddit

No, that would be Bloody Mary ketchup.

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Maleficent-Sink-6367@reddit

It's just North American cocktail sauce, which is superior to the Marie Rose shite served here.

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

Ohhhh, I just love that with fried seafood. That together with tartar sauce are go-to in the US.

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intangible-tangerine@reddit

Cocktail sauce was very popular here in the 60s and 70s. It went out of fashion.

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Sharo_77@reddit

Not in my mums house. Every birthday it's prawn cocktail (I've introduced a variation), duck a'lorange and either profiteroles or pavlova

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Gregs_green_parrot@reddit

In the UK we just call it Thousand Island Dressing, Marie Rose Sauce or Fish Sauce. It's basically the same stuff. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail\_sauce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_sauce)

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djwillis1121@reddit

>cocktail sauce Is it not called Marie Rose sauce here? Pretty common with prawns as a sandwich filling unless I'm thinking of something else.

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turbo_dude@reddit

yes it is but I had never heard that name until today!

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tttttfffff@reddit

Late to the party, but I prefer the ‘knock offs’ brands of brown sauce to HP sauce. I love anchovies, fish sauce, tamarind, but it may be I grew up eating the cheaper versions

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Domski77@reddit

Try and find salt and vinegar crisps in a supermarket outside the UK, it's bloody tough. Even in places like Poland which has a savory cuisine its nigh on impossible.

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ScienceDisastrous323@reddit

Are Salt and Vinegar Pringles only in the UK?

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rustblooms@reddit

Salt and vinegar chips are everywhere in the US. Almost every company makes a version. They are my FAVORITE.

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thorpie88@reddit

Australia has them for obvious reasons

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Bam-Skater@reddit

The US calls it 'steak sauce' but it's near enough the same thing

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New_Stats@reddit

A1 steak sauce (popular in the US) is a recipe that King George IV called A1, hence the name. It uses raisins instead of tamarind, so it's a little less sweet but it's basically the same thing as brown sauce

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Shinjirojin@reddit

My Mexican wife likes it and when she looked at the ingredients she realised it's because it has tamarind in it which is used in Mexican dishes.

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mimisburnbook@reddit

It’s disgusting.

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RevolvingCatflap@reddit

Because it looks like a hangover shit but tastes worse

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professoryaffle72@reddit

It's used over here in Denmark. Especially with a dish called biksemad. Probably the same in the other Nordic countries as well, although can't confirm.

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JezzedItRightUp@reddit

Yeah, you can get HP easily in Finland

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amanset@reddit

Pretty much every supermarket has it in Sweden.

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Dixon_Kuntz73@reddit

If you can find it, the HP Fruity is worth trying as a lighter alternative

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jamesdownwell@reddit

Yep, I wouldn’t call it popular but you can generally find it at any supermarket in Iceland.

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Matrixblackhole@reddit

Probably each country has its own version of whatever they like. Its a bit like why ranch sauce is super popular in the US but not here.

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Gullflyinghigh@reddit

I would assume they're all slightly more sensible than we are. Bloody horrible stuff.

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Artistic_Data9398@reddit

Because it literally has 1 use. Breakfast lol Don’t @ me with you gremlins that have it with pork pies

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StardustOasis@reddit

Colman's OK sauce is very similar to brown sauce, and is only made for the east Asian market these days.

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Stripes_the_cat@reddit

Because it's vile and people only think they like it because they were raised with it? (Like my reply, your post betrays an opinion that might not be universally relevant, which may affect the nature of your question!)

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LordEmostache@reddit

I'm convinced no one actually likes Brown Sauce but pretends to like it to avoid being ridiculed by other people who also pretend to like Brown Sauce.

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Stripes_the_cat@reddit

The sauce that was Thursday

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PeriPeriTekken@reddit

Nah, I was ketchup only as a kid, but I've since moved mostly to brown sauce for bacon/sausages.

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ttdawgyo@reddit

Wait until you try chippy sauce you get on the east coast of Scotland. How that hasn’t traveled I have no idea

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ImChimeraX@reddit

It is, it just has many different names and brand names in different countries. In Japan for instance their tonkatsu sauce is basically the same thing with the popular brand being Bull-Dog.

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Ladzini@reddit

Tonkatsu the same as brown sauce???? fuck me I’ve seen some shite on Reddit today but that takes the crown

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interfail@reddit

Tonkatsu sauce is designed to be an equivalent of brown sauce (with some worcestershire influence, but still vegetarian). It really is a loaned dish. Yeah, it's not identical but it's as similar as anything Wasabi sells to actual Japanese food.

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modumberator@reddit

It looks pretty similar looking at an ingredients list

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djwillis1121@reddit

Isn't tonkatsu closer to BBQ sauce than something like HP?

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InZim@reddit

It's a thick sweet variation of worcestershire sauce, not HP Sauce as the top comment says

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AntiElephantMine@reddit

Agreed, just came back from Japan and the tonkatsu reminded me more of BBQ sauce and nothing like Brown...

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SkullKid888@reddit

An ingredients list means nothing. Pancakes, yorkshire puddings, batter for fish, chicken etc all have an almost identical ingredients list. Very different foods though.

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modumberator@reddit

I Googled and apparently they taste pretty similar except for brown sauce is more 'tart' and tonkatsu is a bit sweeter

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modumberator@reddit

Interesting!

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pattybutty@reddit

IIRC, the Bulldog Tonkatsu sauce came about when a Japanese condiment maker attempted to recreate Worchester sauce.

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ImChimeraX@reddit

I did indeed, and although we call Japanese curry Katsu, that’s just the fried stuff. There’s many more types of curry dishes in Japan than just having a piece of fried meat or veg in it.

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QuirkyFrenchLassie@reddit

I have never tried it. Reading all the comments, maybe I will. Not even sure what I'd eat it with.

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Rafiq07@reddit

Because they know how to season food properly so they don't need an overpowering sauce to make everything just take like the sauce and not of the food itself.

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Gauntlets28@reddit

Americans have it, but they call it steak sauce.

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PeriPeriTekken@reddit

Technically, we have it, but we (Lea and Perrins and A.1.) sell it to the US as "steak sauce".* *At least A1 used to, steak has now been taken out of the name.

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SupaiKohai@reddit

It kinda is in Japan. They just have their own spin on it. Called Tonkatsu sauce. It often includes Worcester sauce but does not consistently have the fruit ingredients. Then there's the addition of soy sauce and sometimes oyster sauce to the recipe. Which gives it a salty mealy edge. But they taste somewhat similar. Just think brown sauce but slightly salty and a little less sweet and not very tangy.

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Namiweso@reddit

Tonkatsu is close to barbeque/Ketchup than it is to Brown Sauce. Knew it didn't sound right as I like Tonkatsu and don't like Brown so had to double check.

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SupaiKohai@reddit

The ingredients are far closer to brown sauce. Ketchup?! Couldn't be further from Tonkatsu sauce. Just because you like the stuff and dislike brown sauce doesn't mean they aren't of similar formulation.

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kishmishari@reddit

In South Asia it's called imli chutney. Most people eat it with things like samosas and pakoras. I've heard that pickapeppa sauce is similar but I have never tried it.

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Fudball1@reddit

Because it looks like it came out of someone's arse.

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Namiweso@reddit

There are better options in most other countries. Brown Sauce to me just tastes far too tangy and vinegary. Like I can completely understand why people don't like Ketchup, but brown sauce is bottom of the pile compared to a lot of other sauces - just those aren't as popular in the UK.

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flashbastrd@reddit

I think it’s actually based on a sauce from the far east. I can’t remember exactly but I’m sure I read it once maybe on the wiki page

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Calm-Bid-6228@reddit

Maybe because other countries don't like it as much?

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ttown2011@reddit

Worcestershire is pretty common in the US (often more pronounced) We don’t use the tamarind stuff

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sjintje@reddit

Because we have hygene and food safety laws that forbid us to store red sauce in barrels for 12 months until it turns brown. ~ the Germans, probably

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Aaargh_Bees@reddit

The title alone is off putting.

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LegoBohoGiraffe@reddit

The second most popular brand is Daddy's brown sauce, if that makes it any better

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LegoBohoGiraffe@reddit

Almost Every country has some sort of savoury condiments that improves flavour, either made with slow cooked vegetables and herbs, sometimes anchovies, sometimes local stuff. but the flavours are very context dependent and not like really nice on their own, just make other things nicer. So which you prefer depends on the cuisine you're cooking with and what you've grown up to enjoy. Look at say Amercian barbeque, east asian fish sauces and miso, South American chili sauce. Even french Mirepoix sort of fits the bill.

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