Category Archives: Spreads & sauces

Spreads & sauces

Feast your eyes: Batty & Co of London

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Batty & Co of London was a pickle and sauce manufacturer. The business was acquired by Heinz in 1905 as part of their entry into the British market.

George Batty (1800 – 1874) was born in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, to a family with South Yorkshire roots. He moved to London and founded Batty & Co in 1824. Four years later he married Eliza Feast from Cheshunt, Herts.

Batty had acquired the recipes of the late Dr William Kitchiner (1775 – 1827), an eccentric but popular celebrity chef of the era, by 1834. Batty & Co produced Dr Kitchiner branded sauces, such as Salad Cream.

Batty formed a partnership with Robert Feast of Waltham Abbey, Essex, and they traded as Batty & Feast from 1836. Feast was almost certainly a relation to Batty through marriage. The merger combined Batty’s factory at 101-2 Leadenhall Street with Feast’s premises at 15-16 Finsbury Pavement, which were used as offices.

Batty & Feast employed 86 people by 1851. The firm wasn’t much smaller than Crosse & Blackwell, which employed 126 people.

Batty & Feast first introduced Nabob sauce at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The firm won the only prize medal for pickles at the exhibition. It was reported in the press that Queen Victoria showed a great interest in the Batty & Feast stand.

The partnership was dissolved by mutual consent in 1852, with George Batty taking on all liabilities. Feast retained the Finsbury offices, and Batty relocated his offices to Leadenhall Street. Batty decided to concentrate on the export trade, particularly Australia.

An independent examination in 1855 reported that Batty & Co “India Soy” comprised of “little more than treacle strongly flavoured with salt”. This was common practice at the time, but undoubtedly the company did not enjoy as high a reputation as Crosse & Blackwell. The company was fined five shillings plus costs for selling short measures of its products in 1867.

Batty & Co employed 110 people by 1861. The company produced around 80 tons of isinglass, made from fish and used for clarifying beer, in 1862.

Batty & Co employed between 50 and 100 men in 1871, the exact figure varying with the season. The company’s best known products, Nabob Pickle and Nabob Sauce, began to be advertised from the 1870s. The company claimed to have been the first to bottle calves feet in jelly, a popular product at the time.

Batty & Co declared bankruptcy in August 1874, with £34,000 in liabilities (£3.5 million in 2015). The company’s assets were said to be of “very considerable value” in The Times. George Batty died in October the same year.

The business was acquired by Slee, Slee & Co, vinegar manufacturers of Southwark, and Batty products remained in production.

In the late nineteenth century Batty & Co built a factory in Peckham. It had 38,000 sq ft of covered space and 33,750 sq ft of open space. The premises included a number of railway arches, 17 for storage and two for processing.

George Batty’s son established a similar business, Henry Batty & Co, in Edinburgh in 1884, which survived until 1926.

Batty & Co was incorporated as a limited company in 1901. The company was acquired by H J Heinz, who wanted a British manufacturing base, in 1905. The Batty brand was phased out in 1910 and its products were rebranded under the Heinz label. The Batty brand survived for a further few years in export markets.

Spreads & sauces

Sauce material: an overview of brown sauce

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HP is the highest-selling brown sauce in Britain and Canada. A1 has higher sales in the United States and Japan. Yorkshire Relish retains popularity in Ireland. OK sauce remains popular in China. In Japan they have their own brown sauce inspired by the English version called tonkatsu sauce.

Arguably the ur-type brown sauce was Lea & Perrins’ Worcestershire sauce. We don’t think of it as a brown sauce today, but its ingredients; molasses, vinegar, citrus fruits, tamarind, and its taste; sweet, bitter, savoury, tangy, spicy; almost certainly informed the earliest brown sauces.

The great celebrity chef of the early Victorian period, Alexis Soyer (1810 – 1858), formulated an early brown sauce, which was manufactured by Crosse & Blackwell from the late 1840s. His Sauce Succulente was described as, “thick, pulpy and of a reddish-brown colour. It contains vinegar, a considerable quantity of tomato, wheat flour, shallots, garlic, redcurrant jelly and several herbs”.

By the early 1850s the brown sauce market had been established. The products tended to include tomatoes, garlic, shallots, mushroom and walnut ketchup, raisins, tamarind, soybean, herbs, spices, and salt. Treacle and caramel were used for colour, and flour was used as a thickening agent. Some contained anchovies.

Brown sauce became popular as a byproduct of industrialisation. Meat that was imported from the country to the towns and cities was up to three days old, and brown sauce improved its flavour.

Henderson Brand introduced A1 sauce in 1862. The sauce contained tomatoes, raisins and orange marmalade.

Brand’s nephew George Mason introduced an imitation of A1 called OK in 1880. OK was thicker, and included more fruit, including mangoes and apples.

HP sauce was introduced in 1889. It is similar to A1 but thicker, and contains tamarind. Other ingredients in the original recipe include garlic, shallots, ground mace, tomato purée, cayenne pepper, ground ginger, raisins, flour, salt and malt vinegar.

HP, A1 and OK were all acquired by large conglomerates in the 1960s. HP was already the highest-selling brown sauce in Britain by this time. However its acquisition by Imperial Tobacco, one of the largest companies in the world, saw investment in new machinery at its factories and a huge increase in marketing spend. Large competitors, including Rank Hovis McDougall and Colman’s, could not compete with Imperial’s massive firepower, and one by one HP’s competitors faded away.

Brown sauce was highly regionalised in Britain as late as the 1970s, with HP the only national player. Daddies was strong in the South West, Fletcher’s was strong in the West and East Ridings of Yorkshire, while Heinz Ideal Sauce and Hammonds Chop Sauce were strong in the North Riding. OK sauce had a large share of the London market.

From the 1970s the supermarkets streamlined their product offerings, usually focussing on the market leader and an own-label brown sauce.

Spreads & sauces

Why can’t you get A1 sauce in the UK?

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The leading brown sauce in Britain is HP. The leading brown sauce in the US is A1.

Broadly speaking, A1 is a cross between HP Sauce and Worcestershire Sauce. HP is sharper and thicker, whereas A1 is a little more fruity. You can find the imported American sauce in larger Tesco supermarkets in the UK. It pairs well with beef, especially in casseroles and meatloaf.

A1 is a British invention, introduced by Henderson William Brand in 1862, when he was co-manager of the cuisine at the International Exhibition in Hyde Park. He submitted the sauce before the Royal Commission for use in the Exhibition’s restaurants. The Chief Commissioner reportedly declared the sauce to be “A.1.”

Gilbert Heublein (1849 – 1937), a German-born spirits distributor resident in Connecticut, visited England and encountered A1 sauce. He was impressed, and after much effort he acquired the exclusive US distribution rights to A1 sauce from 1894. He gained the US production rights from 1916.

A1 was phased out in Britain in the 1970s, forced out of a crowded brown sauce market which included HP, Daddies and supermarket own-label nationally, as well as OK, Heinz Ideal, Hammonds and Fletcher’s Tiger Sauce at a regional level.

The brand is currently owned by Kraft in the US. In Britain, the trademark is currently owned by Premier Foods.