Malt barley, Shoreditch, and a family that knew what it was doing
Thomas Sarson first brewed vinegar from malt barley in 1794, starting out at Craven Street in London. By 1841, James Thomas Sarson, a descendant of the founder, was operating as a vinegar maker at Brunswick Place, Shoreditch, keeping the business firmly in the east of the city where food manufacturing and trade were both deeply embedded. Then sales grew substantially when Henry James Sarson took over from his father, which is the polite way of saying the business went from modest family concern to something considerably more serious. Henry also renamed the product in 1884, calling it Sarson's Virgin Vinegar, a reference drawn from a Biblical parable rather than anything to do with the vinegar itself, which is the sort of Victorian marketing logic that is best accepted without too much scrutiny.
The Vinegar Works and the smell near Tower Bridge
By 1893, the business was trading as Henry Sarson and Sons from premises called The Vinegar Works on Catherine Street in Shoreditch, with two further sons in the business. A factory later established in Tanner Street, Bermondsey, became something of a local landmark, though the nearby approach to Tower Bridge was probably more associated with the persistent smell of malt vinegar than any particular civic pride. London's Metropolitan Archives holds photographs of the works stretching from the 1890s through the 1940s, which says something about how embedded the place became in the city's food manufacturing history.
Consolidation, Manchester, and a Japanese chapter
In 1932 the Sarson family business merged with other British vinegar producers to become British Vinegars Ltd. By 1940, Sarson's was, according to its own records, the only surviving licensed vinegar brewery in the UK, having outlasted 64 others, which is either a remarkable story of quality and resilience or a fairly bleak picture of an entire industry, depending on your outlook. Production eventually moved north to Middleton in Greater Manchester in 1968. The brand passed through Crosse and Blackwell, then Nestlé, then Premier Foods, before being sold in 2012 to Mizkan, a Japanese vinegar manufacturer, for forty-one million pounds. The modern packet carries the Sarson's name as it always has, and the malt vinegar in the pickle jar is still brewed from British barley.
Why the vinegar matters to the pickle
Mixed pickle is not a complicated product. It is vegetables, it is vinegar, and it is time. The character of the vinegar shapes everything about the result, which is why Sarson's malt vinegar has been the relevant backdrop for this kind of British pickle for as long as most people can remember. The tang in a jar of Sarson's Mixed Pickle is the same sharpness that belongs on fish and chips, in a ploughman's lunch, or alongside a cold pork pie on a plate that is not trying to be anything other than what it is.
The jar you did not know you missed until you moved to Canada
There is a specific moment British expats tend to describe, somewhere between the third and sixth month in Canada, when a craving arrives for something pickled and sharp alongside a piece of cheddar and some bread. It is not dramatic. It is just the absence of a jar that used to be in the fridge without anyone thinking much about it. Sarson's Mixed Pickle is that jar, and finding it here in Nova Scotia is, quietly, the kind of thing that sorts out the cheese board and improves a Sunday afternoon considerably. The Great British Shop keeps it in stock for exactly that reason.
