Mandy has submitted the picture of the week with “Saucy Girls“.

and

Roo from Phuket, Thailand writes:

“Anyone about to jet off on their hols to Thailand, well, Phuket specifically, which is where I live, will be pleased to know that God’s Own Sauce, HP, is available in almost all supermarkets and any of the Thai equivalent to the corner shop of dear old Blighty.

Thank you both for your submissions!

This Tuesday, I once again had lunch downtown with a friend of mine. This is the same friend who’s consume soup routinely appears before him sans chives (see: Sing for your Sauce). This time was no different. We ordered our “usual” and the waitress appeared a short time later with our teas & consume soups. She placed his soup before him, followed by his tea before moving on to placing mine before me (chalked full of chives!).

At this point, not having mentioned my previous writings about this topic to him, I was curious to see if he would finally notice the obvious lack of chives in his soup. Or, perhaps he’d continue, unaware of what he was missing. I watched with interest as he received his bowl… His eyes glanced down behind his glasses. After a brief pause he said “Yes….I read your blog!” My face lit up! “And yes….I DID notice!” he exclaimed. LOL

Sigh, I suppose that concludes the lengthy experiment investigating my friends’ observational powers. Still…the underlying question remains. Why? Why does his bowl arrive at his table, week after week without chives in, whereas mine has plenty??

Onto HP related business at hand then.

I picked up another HP Sauce bottle today, circa early 1900’s. My friend Tom is always on the sniff for such things, and he knows by telling me about his finds that I won’t be able to leave it alone - and so my collection of vintage HP Sauce bottles grows.

The trick now is to gather up what info I can on these early bottles and publish it to the site complete with pictures & what not. What’s even trickier is attempting to photograph transparent glass like this while attempting to highlight the etchings on the exterior of the bottle. Good grief. I suppose I’ll have to go through the same routine as one goes through when setting up something for sale on ebay. The corner in my office is destined to become a temporary photography studio - complete with an extremely hot halogen lamp which gets borrowed from the garage and inevitably ends up hanging from the ceiling in a somewhat precarious fashion. The cats too will be all over it as they are with anything brought in from the “outside world”. Ahh what fun awaits!

As for the brown sauce in tea question…let’s just say I’m working myself up to it.

Nikki P has submitted the following recipe!

“Hey guys, i noticed whilst browsing your recipes that you are lacking in the one
ultimate recipe involving brown sauce: The bacon butty!!

You know, that’s precisely why I carry my bottle around with me as well! LOL

Thanks for the submission! Its been added it to the Recipe area, afterall - a brownsauce site without a bacon butty recipe? tsk tsk - what are we thinking!?

While on the topic of recipes, I was browsing through my weblogs recently and noticed something interesting. Someone has been searching google for “brown sauce in tea” and ending up at this site. Going back, they’ve performed this same search more than once as well.

If you’re the one searching for a recipe for “brown sauce in tea”, I’m afraid I can’t help you - yet! Quite honestly I never have considered that combination before. I wonder what kind of tea it would best go with? Earl Grey? English Breakfast? Orange Pekoe?

The next time I have a ‘cuppa’, I’ll attempt a teaspoon in and report back. In the mean time, If anyone knows what this might be about, please write! Please?

A little over a week ago we received a comment from Nigel Britton in the History of Brown Sauce section. Mr Britton is the great great grandson of Edwin Samson Moore and Edward Eastwood. It was Edwin Samson Moore who, with the financial backing of Edward Eastwood, founded the Midland Vinegar Company at Aston Cross (Birmingham), United Kingdom. It was the Midland Vinegar Company who later introduced Garton’s HP Sauce in 1899. Mr Britton’s comments mark the first contact we’ve made with anyone related to HP Sauce and we thank him for his comments!

Today, we received a number of picture submissions for the gallery from Tony. Thanks Tony!

My friend Tom recently discovered a couple of vintage glass HP Sauce bottles at a local antique dealer located in the Johnston Terminal at The Forks here in Winnipeg. Yesterday we took a trip out there and sure enough there were in fact 3 bottles (2 of which I took home with me - I’ll take a return trip sometime next week for the 3rd).

Over lunch Tom -being a collector himself, told us that when people were settling the Red River Valley region in the 1800’s, settlers would first build a sod house (a house made of earth), then over the course of the next few years they would build a more permanent structure nearby. Once the new house was built, the old house would act as a shed or as a building for farm animals with the means of disposing of garbage typically consisting of dumping refuse behind a grove of nearby trees.

This is the place to look if one is to wander around old homesteads searching for old treasures. Although the houses may be long gone, it’s often possible to find the trees which would’ve been used as the dumping area by using old photographs as reference. Any tell tale signs of a disposal site may be long gone nowadays, but by using a metal detector one could find metals such as tin or iron remaining in the soil. The items made of metal may be long gone but things such as glass or pottery would remain. It’s sites like this where the two bottles purchased at the antique dealer are likely to have originated from.

Imagine being a Canadian immigrant in the late 1800’s or early 1900’s. You and your family have finally arrived from overseas to begin your new life from next to nothing on a plot of land out on the open prairie. The food available to you would most likely have come from your own family farm. Spices would have been either unavailable or unaffordable for the longest time. Imagine then how exotic a bottle of HP Sauce would’ve seemed to you!