Recently bought a bottle of HP Sauce and remarked to my son that it's ironic it has a picture of the Houses of Parliament on it when the sauce is made in Birmingham. Living here in New Zealand in the 1970s when I was young, it was a treat to get HP sauce - you could only buy it at gourmet import shops. This sauce I can just about drink by itself. I will have just HP sauce in sandwiches, but it is brilliant with pies, fish and chips, and many much more healthier foods.
Much to my shock when doing a little bit of reseach for this post, I found that the current owner of HP Sauce (global food giant Heinz) closed the Birmingham factory on 16 March 2007 and is now manufacturing this traditional English sauce in the Netherlands. See BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/6455565.stm The Birmingham factory which had produced HP for about 100 years has closed with the loss of 125 jobs. There is an excellent article at http://www.brownsauce.org/ about HP. Reading the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Sauce about HP reminded me of the Fruity sauce which you could also get here in NZ for a while but which wasn't anywhere near as good as the original. HP sauce has been nominated as an icon of England http://www.icons.org.uk/nom/nominations/hp-sauce/view?sortcriterion=Date&statusid=bed4ba16a65145be387f956fb2efdb7f&order=reverse but I'm not sure it will qualify any longer with the change of production to the Netherlands! Another English tradition bites the dust.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment