It's All About The Worcestershire

In spite of recent slightly embarrassing admissions of my proclivities for certain (edible) guilty pleasures, i.e., macaroni & cheese, canned Hormel chili and scalloped potatoes with sliced hotdogs; my number one choice is, of course, the cheeseburger. Even in the middle of the pizza capital of the world, NYC, the cheeseburger is what flows trippingly off my tongue when ordering comfort food. Consequently my interest, along with my taste buds, gets piqued when various surveys of local and nationwide eateries swim into my ken (newspapers, on-line) with a list of “best-of” restaurants and/or specialty foods, usually categorized by city and ethnicity. These lists feature “cuisine” of many different ilk but sometimes our various “comfort” foods are featured, including my sizzling favorite, the cheeseburger.

Just recently, knowing I would be in and around Ft. Myers, FL at the end of this month I went on-line to get the latest chopped meat poop and the cheeseburger winner seems to be Bubba’s Roadhouse & Saloon in Cape Coral…which I instantly penciled into my itinerary. I use a (not always reliable) rule-of-thumb in my searches and that is if you find a good steakhouse you can usually come up with a decent cheeseburger therein. But, as I said, there are pitfalls in this method so it’s best to stick with an establishment where the burger itself is king (no fast food pun intended). For instance, somewhere on that main drag between Ft. Lauderdale and Miami there’s a joint called Le Tub (it’s in Hollywood actually) that lives up to its reputation for fabulous cheeseburgers.

Oh, a slight digression, last month I read an article about the preparation of burgers and what really stuck out in the article was the suggestion that the very best burgers, at home or on the run, are made from freshly on-the-spot ground beef. Yeah, you gotta go to a butcher and watch ‘em grind up a steak for you…making sure it is properly marbled with the right amount of fat. Or you gotta haul out the Cuisinart and grind it yourself or you gotta buy or borrow a hand grinder…I suppose people still have those.

So…where was I…oh, yeah, what this blog is really about is Worcestershire sauce. The above-mentioned article included seven or eight recipes gleaned from the menus of restaurants whose reputations rest on their treatment of this luscious and cheesy American standard. What intrigued me was that almost all of the recipes included Worcestershire sauce as a mixed-in ingredient. Who knew? I thought you just splashed it on top along with any other preferred condiment (mustard anyone?). So the next time I went grocery shopping I trolled the appropriate aisle and chose the brand name I had heard of, Lea & Perrins. L&P, according to their own label, is “The Original” Worcestershire Sauce (since 1835) and the most expensive. (Well, if you can call $1.79 expensive...$1.79 sounds cheap to me.) Okay, here comes the shocker. I am not at all fond of anchovies and guess what the 4th listed ingredient is. Yeah, anchovies! Hmm…yet another “who knew?” moment. Also you should know that L&P has a slogan on the label that reads “Unwrap the Possibilities” which would normally be just grandiose, ad-agency-bull-session nonsense but, in this case, I’m ready to give it a try. Just knowing I’m ingesting some form of anchovy is a possible bad taste, taste-bud deterrent but who knows, I may love it and won’t have to wait three weeks for Bubba’s Roadhouse & Saloon. By the way, Bubba’s boasts of peanut shells on the floor as a positive décor item. Uh oh; hold the anchovies.