PROCESS 06: HP Sauce

I prefer ketchup, but what ya gonna do?

Despite being a strict own-brand household, HP Sauce always has a place in our cupboard. I’m not actually a fan, but my husband Tom won’t eat a bacon sandwich without it. He also puts it on sausage and mash—I can’t cope with sauces and mashed potato. The textures are too wrong. I once knew a girl who put ketchup in her mash and mixed it around until it was a big, pinkish mass. I didn’t go round for tea again.

I’ve always got time for foods that claim a certain dignity. HP Sauce has delusions of grandeur, don’t you think? Named after the Houses of Parliament and decorated with with Elizabeth Tower/Big Ben in pride of place on the front of the bottle, it’s been a British icon for almost 130 years. Why the Houses of Parliament? The inventor of the sauce, Frederick Gibson Garton, heard that politicians were eating it down in the Westminster canteen and thought that’d be great iconography for his product. People must have liked the government a lot more back then.