Why make the most complex Worcestershire sauce recipe at home? Firstly, because it is not always available in stores, secondly, because it is expensive, thirdly, because it is simply interesting.
Surely you have heard the name of this English sauce at least once. You may have even tried the sauce in dishes, because you can find it in stores. And if they didn’t find it or found it too expensive for themselves, they refused to prepare any dishes. And there are many such dishes, because the sauce with a slight taste of slightly rotten fish is the king of glazes and marinades for meat, especially when it comes to grilling or barbecuing. By the way, it is Worcestershire sauce that is included in the Bloody Mary cocktail, turning a mixture of tomato juice and vodka into a drink whose taste will be remembered for a lifetime. And it was he, Worcestershire sauce, who turned out to be an accidental participant in culinary improvisation, as a result of which he was born.
If you ask what you can replace Worcestershire sauce with, I will answer firmly: nothing. Think for yourself, more than 15 ingredients! And the cooking process is absolutely breathtaking!! If you prepare the sauce according to all the rules (which English chefs are silent about because the recipe is a trade secret), you will have to mix anchovies marinated in brine, soybeans, molasses (black molasses), tamarind (date variety), garlic soaked in vinegar , chili, cloves, cardamom, shallots, sugar and a few more spices. You will then age this mixture for 2 years, or 700 days, after which, stirring occasionally, strain and bottle. Like? That's what I'm talking about.
What do you want the impatient and thrifty to do (the sauce is quite expensive)? Making Worcestershire sauce at home - that's it! Of course, you won’t be able to get an authentic one, but it will be very close in taste – very much so. The main condition is to infuse it thoroughly if possible. As for the ingredients, after cooking I want to give you the following tips: it’s better to take shallots, marinate anchovies (if you’re lucky enough to buy fresh ones - I wasn’t lucky), for example, or buy Italian ones in a spicy marinade at the store, and instead of burnt ones you can use.
Worcestershire sauce has a very strong taste and unique aroma. This makes it less of a sauce and more of a spice, a seasoning, an accent. It is enough to add just a little sauce to the dish, give it a Worcestershire “accent” - and it will be transformed.
Preparation time: 20 minutes plus 3-4 weeks for infusion
Finished product yield: about 300 ml
Ingredients
- white or red wine vinegar 1 cup
- burning liquid 50 ml
- soy sauce 50 ml
- sugar 50 grams
- lime juice 25 ml
- anchovies 2 fillets
- hot pepper 1 pod
- 1 small root fresh ginger
- garlic 1 clove
- cinnamon 1 stick
- onion half head
- yellow/white mustard seeds 1.5 tbsp. spoons
- salt 1.5 tbsp. spoons
- black peppercorns 0.5 tbsp. spoons
- cloves 0.5 tbsp. spoons
- curry seasoning 0.25 tbsp. spoons
- cardamom 3 boxes
Preparation
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Crush the cardamom pods in a mortar. Inside you will see seeds - they contain the main aroma.
Add salt, mustard, curry, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and black peppercorns to a small saucepan.
Finely chop the garlic, cut the onion into small cubes, and cut the hot pepper into rings without removing the seeds.
Grate the ginger root on a fine grater—it will take 1 teaspoon when grated.
Squeeze the juice from the lime.
Finely chop the anchovy fillets.
Place the garlic, onion, pepper, ginger and lime juice in a saucepan with the spices. Drain the lime juice, burnt juice and soy sauce there.
Then add vinegar there.
Place the saucepan on the fire and bring the mixture to a boil. Cook Worcestershire sauce for 10 minutes from boiling.
At the same time, melt the sugar and cook a simple caramel, which you also add to the sauce.
Cook the sauce for another 5 minutes.
After this, pour the sauce into a glass jar and refrigerate for 3-4 weeks. Shake the sauce container thoroughly 1-2 times a week.
When the sauce has infused, strain it through a fine sieve.
Store the finished sauce in the refrigerator for 6 months.
Do you know what Worcestershire sauce is? Few housewives have heard anything about this. Let's try to figure it out together and learn something about this sauce in more detail. So, Worcestershire sauce is a universal, popular and very concentrated seasoning of English cuisine with a rich, bright burgundy color, based on a piquant taste.
It consists of one third of tomato paste, and the rest is occupied by about 25 other ingredients, including Jamaican and black peppers, hot chili peppers, walnut extract, ginger, cloves, champignon broth, garlic, flour, salt and wine.
Worcestershire sauce is widely used. It is used in stewed and fried meat dishes, flavored hot appetizers, boiled and fried fish. This seasoning was invented in Britain about a century and a half ago. It has an original, pleasant and piquant sweet and sour taste.
Classic Worcestershire sauce is produced only industrially. The technology for producing the sauce, which is popular in most countries, is naturally kept strictly secret. Real Worcestershire sauce is very concentrated, so it is used literally in drops in dishes. Let's find out how to make Worcestershire sauce at home.
Prepare properly at home real sauce We are unlikely to succeed. The fact is that all culinary reference books usually provide the ingredients for making 10 kg of ready-made sauce. And for such a quantity of product we need microscopic doses of some spices. For example, 1 g each of bay leaf and ginger, chili pepper, 4 g of nutmeg, etc. The finished seasoning can be stored at room temperature 2 years if bottle unopened. Once opened, it is best to refrigerate the sauce. Since it is very concentrated, you need to consume it 3 drops per serving.
Worcestershire Salad Dressing Recipe
Ingredients:
- chicken egg – 2 pcs.;
- lemon – 0.5 pcs.;
- olive oil– 100 ml;
- Parmesan cheese - 30 g;
- French mustard – 20 g;
- Worcestershire sauce - a few drops;
- spices - to taste.
Preparation
Wash the eggs thoroughly in warm water, bring to a boil, immediately turn off the heat and carefully pierce each egg with a needle. Then we lower them again into hot water and leave it to lie there for exactly a minute. During this time, take a lemon, cut it and squeeze the juice from one half into a separate bowl. Now we take out a blender or whisk, crack the eggs with a knife, pour the liquid part of the egg into a blender glass, and scoop out the protein layer from the shells with a spoon. Salt everything and beat thoroughly, gradually adding lemon juice and continuing to stir.
Then grate the hard cheese, pour it into the egg mixture and mix thoroughly again. After this, add a few drops of classic Worcestershire sauce, add sandwich mustard and sprinkle with ground black pepper to taste. Beating the contents of the glass with a blender, pour in olive oil in a thin stream and bring everything to a homogeneous mass. Season the prepared Caesar salad with the resulting sauce and serve the dish.
It’s hard to say what to replace anchovies with if we're talking about about fresh fish. The first time we learned that this was fish was when a group of students were famously putting fish into jars while working at a factory processing saury, seaweed, and other products. Local housewives came running to snatch anchovies from under our hands, which we unknowingly threw into waste because we were told that they were not a game fish.
Then we began to put it on a tray to the side, and in the evening we fried it in a frying pan. A friend who had never eaten any fish ate anchovies on both cheeks, they were so tasty. Canned fish (in jars) cannot be compared with fresh fish. They are usually tough and very salty. You can replace them with sprat or anchovy paste (sold in tubes).
Many people don’t like the taste of soy, so they also often ask what to replace soy sauce with. Due to its specificity, it is quite difficult to replace it. You can also try different varieties and take sauce from different manufacturers to compare and choose the best one. If you really dislike its taste, then try changing it (depending on the dish that is being prepared) to Apple vinegar, just vinegar, use sour berries or balsamic vinegar. This is for salads, and if you use it as a spice, then use ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise or lecho.
Worcestershire Mystery Sauce
Questions are often asked about what Worcestershire sauce is and what to replace it with. Worcestershire, Worcestershire or Worchester - these are different names for the same thing from the English county of Worcestershire, which became known throughout the world thanks to its ingredients in an amount of at least 25 (and the exact composition is still kept a closely guarded secret), special manufacturing technology and very unique taste .
The story of its creation has more than one version, but the name of the county has been preserved exactly. One of the creators was Lord Marcus Sandy, as were the first sellers (and experimenters): apothecaries John Lea and William Perrins went down in history as the creators of the sauce.
The sauce is made only in production and never at home. Therefore, when asking the question of what you can replace Worcestershire sauce with, you risk getting the answer: nothing. This is a fish and vegetable mixture with a set of certain spices. Legend has it that when it was first made, it had such a strong smell that it was put into storage and forgotten there. Only two years later it was opened. Perhaps it was kept for so long on purpose in order to achieve a certain concentration, which remains very strong even now. The sauce is not used with spoons - in drops.
Worcestershire sauce is one of the most important components of the cocktail called Bloody Mary and Caesar salad. In such dishes and drinks, it is unlikely that it will be possible to answer the question: “Worcestershire sauce: what to replace?”, because it is unlikely to be possible to replace them where they are the center of the entire culinary composition. Then it will no longer be Caesar or Bloody Mary. Or English dishes with a strong Russian accent.
Therefore, if you want to get exactly the combination of products as in the recipe, then buy Heinz brand sauce or Lee and Perrins. Otherwise, replace with whatever you want, because you still won’t find anything similar, the desire will not be fulfilled, no matter who you ask “Worcestershire sauce: what to replace it with?” There are many recipes on the Internet for making a sauce under this name, but it is unlikely that you will get anything even close to the taste. Just another good sauce, but not Worcestershire.
What and with what can be replaced
As stated above, anchovies are replaced with sprat or, as the author of one of the recipes said, “worker-peasant” herring. Mascarpone is made from very heavy cream with the addition of wine or wine vinegar. Has a delicate creamy taste. If you can’t get it in the store, you can replace it with full-fat cottage cheese, having previously wiped it. replaced with wine, fennel with stalked celery, capers with olives and olives, and coconut milk with coconut flakes.
Worcestershire sauce is a complex but very original sauce originally from Worcestershire, England. It is quite common here, but Russian speaking countries The sauce conquered the world relatively recently.
At the same time, we haven’t even decided on what to call it correctly, so when you hear such names as Worcestershire or Worcestershire sauce (as well as Worcestershire or Worcestershire), know that we are talking about the same sauce.
Worcestershire sauce has a multifaceted taste, although it is traditionally defined as sweet and sour. However, its taste is so rich that you can taste its entire gamut only by adding it to a dish in tiny portions, or rather, drop by drop.
History of the sauce
The sauce is said to have been created as a mistake by apothecaries trying to recreate an Indian recipe brought to England by Lord Marques Sandys. Chemists John Lea and William Perrins could not please the customer. But after standing in the basement for two years, the sauce was accidentally found by them and tasted, surprising the tasters with its taste. In 1837, unfortunate pharmacists began to sell their invention with all their might, registering Worcestershire sauce as the Lea & Perrins brand.
Thus, the British have been enjoying the taste of Worcestershire sauce for 170 years, adding piquancy to many dishes with its help. However, even now only those initiated into this secret know both the recipe and the technology of the sauce. What is known is that the process of preparing the secret composition takes 2 years.
Sauce composition
Studying the components of the sauce available for research, some chefs claim that Worcestershire Sauce goes back to ancient Roman roots, while others claim that this recipe is a creation of the East. And the components in the composition range from 20 to 40.
All that is known for sure is that it contains water, sugar and salt, as well as: onions - both onions and shallots, anchovies and garlic, asafoetida, tamarind aspic, malt vinegar and molasses (black molasses), soclimon and extract tarragon, black, allspice and chili peppers, celery and horseradish, curry and Bay leaf, ginger and nutmeg.
What do you eat Worcestershire sauce with?
If you decide to try Worcestershire sauce, then you need to remember only one obstacle - there are many more fakes on sale than originals. The thing is that, apart from the Lea & Perrins company, which is now the Heinz brand, no one else has yet been able to recreate all the flavor facets of the sauce, so any other manufacturers, even Heinz itself, are not marked “Lea & Perrins” they make fakes!
But if you are not a hardcore gourmet, then the “fake” Worcestershire sauce produced under the brands “Cajun Power”, “French’s” and “Heinz”, which we have already mentioned, are quite good options.
Having become the owner of a bottle with the coveted mixture, the joy of ownership quickly gives way to confusion due to the question: what should you eat this unique Worcestershire sauce with?
It turns out that this sauce is unique - it can be added not only to any meat and fish dishes, but also in salads, vegetable stews, cereals and omelettes. An excellent alternative to soy sauce, it complements marinades and bean dishes, burgers and croutons. By the way, Worcestershire sauce is the highlight of many dishes. For example, without it you will never taste real salad"Caesar". And in the Bloody Mary cocktail, the presence of sauce is mandatory.
What can you substitute for Worcestershire sauce?
Yes, perhaps - nothing. It has no analogues. After all, the proportions and composition of this potion are known only to Lea & Perrins.
However, over almost 200 years, chefs have, of course, developed many compounds that imitate Worcestershire sauce. And many experimenters simply tried to recreate it at home. And that's not bad at all. After all, judge for yourself, it’s better to try to make the sauce, even if it’s not original, on your own than to buy, in most cases, a counterfeit bottle with an unknown composition, full of dyes, preservatives and other “chemicals.” Moreover, only a few people know what true Worcestershire sauce tastes like.
Worcestershire sauce recipes
Assuming that it is better to create a “fake” sauce, or its analogues, with your own hands than to buy it, we will offer you several recipes, the creators of which claim that the taste of their sauce differs from the original only in the absence of two years of aging in the basement.
To make Worcestershire sauce at home, you will need an accurate kitchen scale and endless patience. 
You may also have trouble finding some of the products included in it. However, you understand that you are not preparing the original, so feel free to introduce substitutions. For example, it would be appropriate to use sprat or herring instead of anchovies, Mascarpone cheese instead of heavy cream, wine instead of balsamic vinegar, and black olives instead of capers.
Home "Worchester"
Prepare:
- onion - 1 pc.
- garlic - 2 cloves
- chili pepper - 4 pcs.
- vinegar - 2 tbsp.
- soy sauce - 1 tbsp.
- sugar - 0.5 tbsp.
- kosher (or rock) salt - 3 tbsp. l.
- molasses - 0.5 tbsp.
- ginger (fresh) - 25 gr.
- cinnamon - 1 stick
- cardamom - 5 pods
- mustard (in seeds) – 3 tbsp.
- curry (powder) – 0.5 tsp.
- cloves - 1 tsp.
You need to prepare it like this:
- Peel the onion, garlic and ginger and chop finely. Cut the chili in half, remove the seeds, and chop the cardamom.
- Mix all ingredients, except granulated sugar, and cook over medium heat until the first signs of boiling appear. Reduce heat and simmer for about 10 minutes.
- Place the sugar in a dry frying pan and melt until it turns into brown caramel, then add it to the sauce and simmer for another 5 minutes.
- Remove the sauce from the stove and pass through a fine sieve (gauze), pour into jars for storage. After cooling, transfer to a cool place (refrigerator) for storage. He can stay here for 7-8 months.
Consume by adding 2-5 drops to a dish of meat, vegetables or fish.
Home "Worchester"
Prepare:
- anchovies – 1 pc.
- onion - 1 pc.
- garlic - 2 cloves
- tamarind (paste) - 0.5-1 tbsp. l.
- soy sauce - 125 ml
- chili pepper (red hot), powder - 0.5 tsp.
- vinegar essence - 2 tbsp.
- salt - based on taste
- sugar - 0.5 tbsp.
- ginger (fresh pulp or ground) - 1 tsp.
- cinnamon - 0.5 tsp. powder or 1 stick
- cardamom (powder) – 0.5 tsp.
- curry (powder) – 0.5 tsp.
- white mustard (in seeds) – 2 tbsp.
- black pepper (peas) - 1 tsp.
- cloves - 1 tsp.
You need to prepare it like this:
- Peel the onion and add acetic acid.
- After half an hour, remove the onion and finely chop.
- Grind the garlic with a press (garlic press) and sprinkle with vinegar.
- Place onions, garlic, cloves, peppers, ginger and cardamom in a gauze bag. It's good to tie this creation.
- Pour soy sauce and vinegar essence, diluted with water to 6%, into the pan. Pour sugar into the liquid and add a bag of spices and tamarind.
- Boil the mixture over low heat for half an hour. At this time, you need to chop the anchovy extremely finely, grind it with curry, add salt and a small amount of water until you get a liquid mass, which you immediately add to the saucepan with the future sauce.
- After 30 minutes of cooking, move the bag into a glass container (or a jar) and fill it with sauce from the saucepan. When the composition has cooled, the jar should be closed and placed in the refrigerator for a week. Every day you need to open the sauce and squeeze out the bag.
- After a week, throw away the bag and strain the sauce into glass storage containers. The sauce should only be stored in the refrigerator.
Homemade Worcestershire sauce
This sauce is ideally close to the original, but it has one drawback - it is prepared in a minimum dose - 10 kg. After studying the components of the recipe, you will understand why. It is composed on the basis of the components indicated on the sauce label and is adapted for making at home.
Prepare:
- anchovies or spicy sardellas – 190 gr.
- celery – 80 gr.
- horseradish – 40 gr.
- water – 3 liters
- dessert wine (for example, Tokay) or port – 760 gr.
- malt vinegar, 10% – 2.3 liters
- tamarind – 570 gr.
- tomato paste – 950 gr.
- meat broth boiled to a jelly state, low-fat and clarified (aspic) – 70 g.
- lemon – 190 gr.
- meat extract – 80 gr.
- walnut extract - 190 gr.
- tarragon extract (vinegar tincture) – 10 g.
- champignon extract-decoction - 570 gr.
- chili pepper extract - 340 gr.
- chili pepper (piece) – 1 gr.
- allspice – 4 gr.
- black pepper (ground into powder) – 80 gr.
- curry (powder) – 100 gr.
- nutmeg powder – 4 gr.
- ginger (fresh grated pulp or ground) – 1 gr.
- bay leaf (piece) – 1 gr.
- salt – 230 gr.
- granulated sugar – 230 gr.
- burnt sugar (melted) – 19 gr.
You need to prepare it like this:
- We prepare all the components, weigh what is cleaned and cut - peel, chop, squeeze the juice out of the lemon.
- Place all ingredients, except burnt sugar, in a heat-resistant container (pour in water carefully at the very end) and boil for about 15 minutes after boiling.
- Add the burnt sugar, melted in a frying pan, while still warm and sticky, into the sauce and simmer for another 5 minutes.
- Remove the sauce from the heat and strain through a fine sieve (gauze), pour into jars for storage.
Worcestershire sauce should be stored in the refrigerator and consumed by adding 2-6 drops to any savory dish.
Worcestershire sauce is added to hamburgers and haute cuisine, meat is marinated with it and cocktails are prepared with it. More than 20 ingredients that are known to everyone and the taste of their combination, which is still not repeated by anyone, make this sauce very popular.
In what form is it sold:
A thick liquid, highly concentrated, sweet and sour, slightly piquant, fermented English sauce is produced on an industrial scale and bottled in glass bottles of varying sizes. The original sauce is produced only under the Lea&Perrins brand. However, this historically first manufacturer and sole owner of the recipe today belongs to the Heinz company.
Heinz also makes Worcestershire sauce, but the label is different. In addition, in supermarkets you can find an analogue from French's and Cajun Power, which are produced according to an approximate recipe, based on vinegar, anchovies, garlic, Jamaican allspice, black pepper, English red onion, Madagascar cloves, and numerous other ingredients, including tamarind, asafoetida and other exotic spices.
Worcestershire sauce is loved all over the world because it is universal and suitable for almost any dish of meat, fish, and vegetables. It is not poured like other sauces. The thick consistency of the product is added drop by drop, and therefore it is very economical.
Where to add Worcestershire sauce:
In Greece, a real Greek salad cannot be made without this sauce.
In Spain it is added to many salads and cold appetizers.
In China, Worcestershire sauce has become a real rival to its soy counterpart. It is used to create marinades for vegetables, meat, fish, and mushrooms.
In Canada and Central America, legumes are not eaten without this famous British product.
The classic Caesar salad, which comes from North American cuisine, is not prepared without
Worcestershire sauce. They make dressing and croutons with it.
In the USA, it is a constant companion to meat dishes. It is offered with hamburgers.
All over the world, Worcestershire sauce is a mandatory component of the Bloody Mary cocktail. Thanks to a few drops of this product, vodka remains colorless, without coloring when interacting with tomato juice.
Worcestershire sauce - what to eat it with:
The inhabitants of Britain have never been known for their elegance in food, so this product has become a real British legend, adding to the short list of culinary inventions of the inhabitants of Foggy Albion. Worcestershire sauce is used for marinade and also as a seasoning for:
- stewed and fried meat dishes (roast beef, stew),
- for fried and boiled fish;
- to any fried, stewed, boiled vegetables, mushrooms;
- hot appetizers (bacon with scrambled eggs);
- for cheese dishes and bread (salty pastries);
- sandwiches, croutons and other light foods and cold snacks.
It is called the sauce of Lucullan dinners because without it even a richly laid table will seem poor to the British. It has a non-standard taste, so it will not be possible to find an adequate replacement for it.
What cannot be combined with:
Worcestershire sauce is not served with desserts, fruits, sweet pastries, tea, coffee, or juices.
Health benefits of Worcestershire sauce:
ABOUT beneficial properties history is silent about sauce from Worcestershire due to the secrecy of the recipe, however chemical composition him is known. It is rich in vitamins B2 and PP. Worcestershire contains potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron, phosphorus and sodium. Minimal amounts of adding sauce to dishes, even with its constant use, are unlikely to lead to any noticeable effect. However, like any natural product, it is useful, especially in winter.
Harm:
The calorie content of Worcestershire sauce is 78 kcal per 100 grams of product, but do not think that it is contraindicated when following a diet. It is consumed so little with a strong taste effect that it will not be possible to exceed the calorie content of dishes.
The only contraindication may be the presence in the sauce of one or another allergen that is individually intolerable. There are more than 20 components in total.
Worcestershire sauce - ingredients:
Since the exact recipe is known only to the manufacturer, you can only get to the bottom of the truth using the label of the purchased product and experiment. Approximately the sauce contains:
garlic, onion and shallots,
chili, black and allspice;
anchovies or sardellas;
tamarind, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg;
celery, asafoetida, bay leaf, tarragon;
lemon juice;
molasses, sugar or syrup, salt;
vinegar (traditionally malt).
Many components come from Albion's colonial past.
How to replace Worcestershire sauce
While preparing this article, I noticed that people quite often ask how to make Worcestershire sauce at home. I studied this issue a little and realized that this is an absolutely pointless idea and here’s why:
Here is a list of ingredients to make something like Worcestershire sauce:
Onion, garlic, black pepper, anchovy, ginger, mustard seeds, salt, curry, ground cinnamon, red pepper, cloves, cardamom, acetic acid, cane sugar, soy sauce, tamarind.
After that,
Once you buy everything, you will still need to tinker to make a sauce out of them, which must be infused. Some of the ingredients will be more difficult to buy than a bottle of ready-made sauce. Now ask yourself a question - do you need it?
If you have a simple task: for example, replacing Worcestershire sauce in a Caesar salad, take balsamic vinegar cream or Teriyaki sauce.
I compared the tastes and aftertaste of 5 sauces with Worcestershire and came to the conclusion that if you need to replace its taste, then the above sauces are perfect.
- According to one of the legends of the creation of the sauce, in the era of Queen Victoria and Sherlock Holmes, the English Lord Sandys returned to good old England from Bengal, where he performed gubernatorial duties on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain. He brought with him the sauce recipe and exotic ingredients. The Lord could not adapt to the bland and decorous English cuisine after the spicy oriental one and handed over the recipe to pharmacist-chemists John Lea and William Perrins in anticipation of a miracle. The product they prepared tasted terrible. The keg was forgotten in the basement. The miracle happened only a year later, when it was discovered and... tasted. In the late 40s of the 19th century, pharmacists bought the recipe from the lord and began producing the product under the brand name “Lea & Perrins,” naming it after the county in which they lived.
- Worcestershire sauce is perhaps one of the most legendary English sauces. He became famous throughout the world. For example, in the early 20th century, Tibetan monks honored explorer Francis Edward Young by serving a bottle of Worcestershire sauce as a condiment during lunch in Lhasa.
- Do not try to prepare the original at home. It's not so much difficult as it is impossible. The recipe and manufacturing technology have been kept secret for almost two centuries. Even the composition of ingredients approximately calculated by competitors requires the preparation of the product on an industrial scale (to obtain 10 kg of sauce under appropriate maturation conditions, which were created in the basements of the Lea & Perrins plant). Any non-original recipes are just another imitation of the product.
- The mysterious habitat of the sauce was created by the 1886 earthquake that occurred in New Zealand: it was completely destroyed locality at ground zero, but the original bottle of Worcestershire sauce survived. They were found almost a century later, in the 70s of the 20th century, during excavations.
