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HP sauce bottles no longer carry French text, it was dropped in 1984 to howls of protest apparently. Not least from teachers of French who said it introduced young people to real non-classroom French for the first time. The decision inspired one of those bastions of British middle class outrage, a letter to the Times:
Sir,
Am I alone among your readers in deploring the loss of that much loved and most piquant of French primers – the label on the HP Sauce bottle?
If unfortunate circumstances decreed that there was nothing else to read at the breakfast table one could always turn to the HP Sauce bottle for a little French revision. It will be sadly missed.
HP sauce is a particularly British phenomenon, if you live in the US, don’t go Wall Mart or any other supermarket, go to Amazon to get it. It is even more difficult to find in France. I lived there for 20 years and never saw it once on a supermarket shelf save perhaps the foreign products one and even less on a French table. More fool them possibly.
Like the outraged Times correspondent, I regret the passing of that text. It was one of my first contacts with a foreign language and gave the sauce some mystery (don’t laugh – I was only a teenager). I imagined it had some exotic and sophisticated origin that made me want to associate with it. The strange thing is that it was put there in the first place for no apparent reason.
Foreign words give products and companies kudos. Prosciutto crudo sounds so much better than raw ham, you might shop in Bon Marché, but would you want to be seen in Cheap?, and foie gras as fatty liver anyone?
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Does anyone have a copy of the full text or have a web reference?
It seems that it’s changed over the years. I found these references:
http://www.brownsauce.org/2008/06/23/visitor-submissions-french-label-anyone-for-daddies/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Sauce
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A40572227
I remember sitting my French “A” Level in ’72 and having no clue what the French for “mixture” was – until I remembered the good old HP Sauce bottle!! Salut Le HP!