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No Man's Land: The International Group for Great War Archaeology


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HP Sauce Bottle







HP Sauce Bottle

A broken Garton's HP Sauce bottle.

This bottle was recovered from a dump of bottles and tins in Dan's trench on the lip of Ultimo Crater.

HP Sauce is an iconic English condiment, a fruity brown sauce with a blend of spices an malt vinegar, a popular accompanyment to savoury food. HP sauce was invented in the latter part of the 19th century by Frederick Gibson Garton, a grocer from Nottingham. By the time of the Great War it was already popular, bringing the taste of spices to the mass market. It was a favorite of the troops in the trenches, as a small amount could make bully beef more palatable and adding a dash of the familiar sauce to army rations would provide a taste of home.

Bottles bearing the HP branding are quite often uncovered in our excavations of the trenches of both the British and German front lines. The tasty sauce being one of the items which German troops were keen to aquire during trench raids, with the aim of annoying their enemy at its loss and to enhance their own army rations.

HP Sauce was manufactured in Birmingham, England by the Midland Vinegar Company and was exported through out the British Empire, France and Scandanavia. The name is reputed to stand for "Houses of Parliment" and the paper labels carried a picture of the famous London landmark. Today the brand is owned by H.J.Heinz and is still as popular as ever.





"The HP Sauce Cookbook" by Paul Hartley.

A saucy collection of 40 recipes, from bestselling author Paul Hartley who has ingeniously challenged our thinking regarding the supposed limitations of some of our best-loved storecupboard icons. He has found a world that goes way beyond mere spreading onto toast, or squeezing into sandwiches. So here are casseroles with clout, suprisingly rich gravies, a brown Bloody Mary and meat marinading ideas galore - these are recipes we all want to cook, created in surprisingly easy and tasty new ways. The HP Sauce Cookbook is beautifully packaged with fun fillings of history and lore and stunning archive imagery from over 100 years of the nation's favorite brown sauce.








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