I liked Talia Felix’s Etymonline post about A.1. Sauce so much I thought I’d share it; it’s a nice bit of philological/historical investigation:
In personal curiosity I was looking at a webpage about the history of H.P. Sauce. The page also included a history of A.1. Sauce, which some people evidently think tastes similar. It claimed that this latter sauce was invented by the chef of King George IV and that the king himself gave it the name of “A-1.” While I felt an initial burst of excitement – I’m a big fan of George IV or “Prinny” as he was long known – I also had some skepticism. Prinny died in 1830, several years before our first attestation of A-1 as slang (1837, in Charles Dickens). And I’ve read Aspinall’s collection of Prinny’s letters – A-1 doesn’t sound like the way Prinny talked, even when he was being informal (drunk). Likely he’d have favored a French word or something out of Grose: elderly monarchs aren’t known for being on top of slang trends.
I started looking on Newspapers.com for some indication that A.1. Sauce was really that old. Almost immediately I turned up an advertisement from 1881 where the company’s own product description said it was invented in 1862 for the International Exhibition, and that the Chief Royal Commissioner was the person who called it A.1.
So where did all this stuff about George IV and the sauce being from the 1830s come from? Well the rest of my day got spent trying to untangle that. Short version is: none of that Prinny stuff is correct; but because Wikipedia got hold of it, it’s hopelessly all over the place now, and all your AI answers will say it’s true. It looks to have resulted from perhaps legitimate confusion (or perhaps deliberate exaggeration) of certain facts.
Click through for the details, which can have their own interest; I particularly like this parenthetical:
(Note that most sources say the International Exhibition was in South Kensington; but one of the entrances was at Hyde Park Corner and another required crossing Hyde Park. Maps of the exhibition show the “refreshment rooms” were near the entrances by the park.)
Always check maps!
Forgot to mention this bit:
Zisnosakouska?!
Zisnosakouska
Image here. It is described as “the Royal Army and Navy Relish, a Russian Condiment (compote de chôses divers).” The blogger who posted it is mystified as well: “I haven’t found ‘Zisnosakouska’ anywhere outside Brand’s ads. A ‘закуска’ is a Russian pre-meal snack / hors d’oeuvre, but the Brand’s condiment sounds rather more like the Romanian ‘zacuscă’, a savoury mixed-vegetable spread.”
“Zis zakouska?”
“Zis no zakouska!”
“You put sheet on bed, I keel you!”
anchovy sauce
Patum Peperium? (aka Gentleman’s Relish, dates to 1828, so ‘Prinny’ might have encountered it.)
zakuska in Russian is also something one eats withn vodka (I guess, pairing is a suitable English word) . zisno doesn’t sound like a Russian word at all. If we have to fit it into Russian, maybe it’s a corruption of известная (well known). Similar Ukrainian word is звісна [zvisna] which also means “usual”. I’ve used fem. forms because zakuska if fem. Maybe Polish has something similar or even more phonetically close.
Saying that HP sauce tastes anything like A1 is a sign of civilization’s demise.
If one questions the quality of the ad’s transcription of Russian, it also has “Kromoskeys à la Muscovite”, which is competent. Dunno if French cromesquis was available at the time.
Ah, Wikipedia peddling bullshit: Old school! We tend to forget this in these latter days when so many things have gotten so much worse, but Wikipedia is not and never has been actually good. I refuse to fall into the fallacy of thinking it is pretty good, except in the areas of my expertise. The baseball history pages are hopeless. And no, I am not going to make it my life’s work to fix them and keep them fixed despite the best efforts of a horde of “editors.” An acquaintance of mine tried to do that and got shouted out.
The rule for Wikipedia still stands: It is a good enough source of good enough information, when “good enough” is all you need, but even this is with the exception of any topic that is controversial. Also, non-experts can’t know what is and is not controversial. Good luck!
@do
The veggie spread seems to be a Rumanian zacusca eaten e.g., in Poland under that name. For the first part all I could come up with is Polish jesienna (“autumn”).
It was not until well into the Showa Era (during the MacArthur regency interlude) that the 19th-century UK style of “brown sauce” achieved its apotheosis at the other end of Eurasia as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonkatsu_sauce.
Etymonline is hardly in a position to throw stones at Wikipedia: it too has plenty of material that’s just copied out of obsolete sources, such as mythical etymologies for raccoon, persimmon (ultimately from the same 1907 source as the “raccoon=scratches with hands” myth), and hackmatack that professional dictionaries dropped decades ago. It doesn’t even have “citation needed” or “incomplete etymology” tags as Wikipedia and Wiktionary do.
There’s a certain phonetic similarity to shakshouka. I have no idea if there’s a connection:
WikiP claims an etymology:
Of course, WikiP also says:
OK, what’s the first from?
[Chaouia is a Berber language]
Finally, the Turkish one:
Meanwhile, Wikt claims that shakshouka and chakhchoukha are spelling variants of the same dish.
At this point, my understanding is bubbled and mixed up, and also torn into small pieces.