A Malaysian home cook recently went viral on Threads after swapping Worcestershire sauce in her bolognese for budu — and the result, she said, was “next level” umami. But buried in her post was a claim that caught people’s attention: that Worcestershire sauce was originally inspired by Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce.
It’s a bold claim. But is it true?
The answer, as with most colonial-era food histories, is complicated — and fascinating.
The Bottle on Every Shelf
Worcestershire sauce as we know it today was concocted by two chemists named John Lea and William Perrins in the mid-1830s, and Lea & Perrins has remained the most trusted source for the umami-heavy condiment ever since.
The Lea & Perrins brand was commercialised in 1837 and was the first sauce to bear the Worcestershire name. The packaging originally stated that the sauce came “from the recipe of a nobleman in the county.”
That nobleman, according to popular lore, was a Lord Sandys who had developed a taste for a particular sauce while posted abroad. According to one origin story, Lord Marcus Sandys, a former governor of Bengal, commissioned Lea and Perrins to recreate a sauce he had tasted in India, believed to have included vinegar, molasses, tamarind extract, fermented anchovies, onion, garlic, cloves, chilli pepper, and other spices.
There’s just one problem. Neither Marcus Lord Sandys nor any Baron Sandys was ever a Governor of Bengal, nor had they ever visited India as far as available records indicate. The origin story, as romantic as it is, appears to have been largely fabricated — or at the very least, embellished over time.
The Southeast Asian Connection
Even if the Lord Sandys tale is dubious, the broader colonial connection to Asian fish sauce is harder to dismiss.
According to Fish: Food from the Waters, the British first encountered “fish sauce” in what is today Indonesia as early as 1684. At that time, most cultures in the Southeast Asian region pickled the easily available anchovies in salt brine and let it ferment for months to create a fermented sauce packed with umami flavour. The Rakyat Post
Crucially, Lea & Perrins themselves have noted that the recipe was brought back to England from Southeast Asia — a detail found in a behind-the-scenes video the company produced about their manufacturing process.
The ingredients in the final product also tell a story. Worcestershire sauce includes tamarind paste and fermented anchovies — two key ingredients deeply embedded in the cuisines of South and Southeast Asia. These weren’t exactly staples in a 19th-century English pharmacy.
Enter Budu
On the other side of this story is budu — Malaysia’s own ancient fermented anchovy sauce, and the ingredient our viral home cook reached for.
Budu is a traditional anchovy sauce condiment made among ethnic Malays populating the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, particularly in Kelantan and Terengganu. It is traditionally made by mixing anchovies and salt and allowing the mix to ferment for 140 to 200 days.
Budu exists because it had to. Along the Kelantan coast, fishing communities needed a way to preserve protein through the monsoon season. Excess anchovies were too precious to waste. Salt and fermentation became survival tools, and over time, flavour followed function.
Budu has since been declared a heritage food by Malaysia’s Department of National Heritage.
The process — anchovies, salt, fermentation, time — is almost identical to what goes into Worcestershire sauce at its core. The difference is largely what gets added afterwards: Worcestershire sauce layers in tamarind, vinegar, molasses, and spices to create a more complex, shelf-stable Western condiment.
So, Who Inspired Who?
Here’s where honesty matters. The claim that Worcestershire sauce was directly inspired by budu specifically is difficult to prove, and some food historians urge caution.
Some may argue that Worcestershire sauce was inspired by the Asian fish sauce, but it’s very difficult to prove this when garum — the ancient Roman fermented fish sauce — was available in Europe long before that.
Worcestershire’s flavour profile resembles garum, a condiment from ancient Greece, Rome, and Byzantium that was created from salted and fermented fish remains. Fish sauces have also been a staple of East Asian cooking for centuries, so it’s unclear if Lea and Perrins were actively trying to copy any sort of variation.
What is more defensible is the broader argument: that the British Empire’s expansion into Asia introduced English merchants, chemists, and aristocrats to a whole world of fermented, umami-rich condiments — and that this exposure shaped what eventually became Worcestershire sauce. It is likely that colonial-era imports of these spices, condiments, and flavours inspired the eventual creation of Worcestershire sauce.
The Bolognese Moment
Whether or not budu is the direct ancestor of Worcestershire sauce, the Threads cook’s experiment reveals something more immediate: the two work the same way.
Both are fermented anchovy-based liquids loaded with glutamic acid — the compound responsible for umami. Studies on budu have found that bacteria in the fermentation process produce glutamic acid and aspartic acid, both associated with the umami taste. It is precisely this that makes budu a logical stand-in for Worcestershire in a slow-cooked meat sauce.
In a way, when she tipped budu into her bolognese, she may have been unknowingly completing a circle — returning a sauce to something closer to its original inspiration.
The Bigger Picture
Food history rarely follows clean lines. Sauces don’t carry passports. When the British invaded and colonized India and Southeast Asia, many of the world’s food cultures were changed forever — one consequence of that was the creation of Worcestershire sauce.
That the global pantry now includes both Worcestershire sauce and budu, and that a Malaysian home cook can use one in place of the other and get remarkable results, is perhaps proof enough that their origins are intertwined — even if the exact history remains murky.
The umami, at least, doesn’t lie.