Consider the brown source

Brown sauce. As names go, it's hardly a winner. It evokes – let's face it – chocolate slurry, the sewery gush, the eventual way of all meals. But despite this, it's welded itself into the western psyche. Every supermarket on both sides of the Atlantic has a chestnut imitation, every roadside caff its littering little sachets.

Most Brits – perhaps especially during election week – associate it with HP. The brand accounts for 71% of the UK brown sauce market, and is also the most popular with Canadians. In America, with somewhat unimaginative specificity, the equivalent is A1 Steak Sauce, dolloped almost entirely on beef.

It's almost shocking how delicious HP is. From its lowbrow reputation and unappetising hue bursts a remarkable aroma: complex, fuggy and fruity, like swimming through compost and Jif. It tastes better than it smells, too, a sweet-sour, subjugating blend. In truth, I never expected to like it - ours was a ketchup family – although in Edinburgh, where I grew up, every chippie uses brown sauce let down with vinegar as the "salt'nsoss" for its fish or haggis suppers.

A Nottinghamshire grocer concocted the primordial recipe in the 1870s using ingredients thrown up by empire: tamarind, dates and molasses. He registered the name HP Sauce in 1895, cannily claiming that Parliament had started serving it, and decorating his bottles with the now-familiar lithograph of the Commons. A nearby vinegar manufacturer bought both recipe and brand in 1903 for £150, and the rest is proverbial. (There is no evidence in the sauce's official history to support the claim that the name comes from the initials of a Mr Harry Palmer, a gambling addict who sold his recipe for "Harry Palmer's Famous Epsom Sauce" to cover his debts.)

The sauce caught on quickly. HP's rival, the horribly named Daddies, began production in 1904, and by 1940 brown sauce was so well known that the ever brand-conscious Betjeman could write in the poem Lake District: "I pledge her in non-alcoholic wine / And give the HP Sauce another shake." Harold Wilson, his wife blabbed to the Sunday Times, would "drown everything in HP Sauce" – and though in fact the PM preferred Worcestershire Sauce, he knew that a reputation for liking HP lent him man-of-the-people cred.

For much of the 20th century, HP's octagonal bottles were bedizened with French drivel about the sauce's digestive qualities, and when the company abandoned these European pretensions in 1984 readers wrote to the Times bewailing "the loss of that much loved and most piquant of French primers – the label on the HP Sauce bottle". If, like me, you don't remember that miniaturised textbook, Marty Feldman sang it in a reasonable parody of Jacques Brel.

A glance at HP's Facebook fanpage highlights two things: the simplicity of the dishes it accompanies and the homesick internationalism of its fans. Brown sauce is one of the most teary-eyed expat foods – a Proustian goo thick with memories of home and home cooking. Jamie Oliver is a fan, and Sam Mendes loves it so much he plugged it in his otherwise dreary film Road to Perdition.

They may not make it here in the UK any more – there was a rightful outcry when production moved to Holland – but HP remains wholly British in spirit: "The Official Sauce of Great Britain" as a former strapline had it. The sauce is proof that this country enjoys strong flavours and layered complexity in its food as much as any other nation, and the brown stuff will always remain the best complement to one of our greatest offerings to the world: the full English breakfast.

So what do you think? Was it mother's milk to you, or can you barely stand the stuff? Should we, like the Americans, slop it on steak? And most divisively of all, where do you stand in the great bacon butty debate: ketchup or HP?