In my experience, A1 is about the same flavor and consistency as what they call “brown sauce” in the UK, where it is usually slathered on various types of fried pork at breakfasttime.
Exactly.
I’ve had (and enjoy) HP Sauce, which is one of the big “brown sauces” in England; to me, it’s closer in flavor to Heinz 57 Steak Sauce than it is to A1.
Bob collected cookbooks, and his favorites were from this era. They all had this odd color shift that made photos unnaturally colored. This photo is right in line with those
While it looks like research has semi-confirmed A1, my first though was Browning Sauce, a la:
Its ingredients include caramel, vegetable base (water, carrots, onions, celery, parsnips, turnips, salt, parsley, spices)
It’s also old, and discounting some of the low quality, plastic tasting stuff like in the above example, I do actually find it useful for a few dishes where some of the vegetable notes balance out some flavors. Actually, I mostly use it in homemade Nuka Cola, where it broadens the flavor, but that’s me.
While Kitchen Bouquet was my first idea, too, the dark caramel coloring in it is intense enough that 1 tablespoon would have seriously darkened the dip. That stuff is like dye.
Little-known fact: food stylists/photographers paint it on the outside of raw beef roasts to make them look like they’ve been fully roasted for media photographs.
Yeah, I read your mention but wanted to expand (and include a link!) for those who didn’t know what was meant by the name alone. Should have credited to you for mentioning it first though, that’s entirely on me.
And yeah, I’ve seen the hacks where advertisers use KB on meats including turkeys to get the GBD (golden brown delicious) appearance on food that’s frozen so it holds it’s form under the hot lights. It is a potent coloring agent (one of the reasons it’s used in my “cola” formula) but then again… I’ve seen a lot of those 50-70’s recreations and note that very few of them actually LOOK like the photos that claim to represent them when created outside a studio environment. 
For people who want a gross and/or comedic take on the whole thing, back from the era when Cracked Online used to do actual articles:
So, who is gonna volunteer to make this delightful culinary confection and report back?
I’d do it. No cream in the house. I got the rest.
It’s gotta be kinda good. Cream cheese is good alone. A few tasty bits and it would be better. Even more things added and it would be mo’ better.
I can think of about dozen things to jazz that up. (Maybe 2 dozen)
ETA, I just realized that’s the basic recipe for a dip made with canned salmon and diced onion added.
It had Kitchen bouquet in it.
We’ve solved it. It’s some kinda meat condiment that is meant by “meat sauce”
The more you know…
Right. And it’s not a little sweeter than Worcestershire, it’s totally sweeter because it contains raisins and corn syrup. Worcestershire is salt and fermented fish. No sweetness at all.
I agree with others. It has to be something like A1. The recipe calls for one tablespoon. This will be something out of a bottle. So, what sauce from a bottle do you put on meat? A1. There are probably others but it will be something like that I’d think (BBQ sauce seems very wrong for this).
Is there something like Bovril in the USA? It is made of beef and is spreadable like Marmite, so it is kind of a meaty sauce.
Bovril no longer contains any beef at all as shown in the wiki you cited.
That information is out of date. My source is the jar of Bovril I am currently holding that lists beef broth as the first ingredient.
I’ll take your word for it. But I’ll ask you to make sure it doesn’t say beet broth.
ETA: I see in the wiki that beef was returned to the mix a few years after it was removed. You are correct sir!
Wrong. People made spaghetti back then the same ways they make it now. Many did use jarred sauces (Ragu, etc.) but many, like my mother, made their own sauce and meatballs. I’ve been trying to recreate it because it was better than any of the jarred stuff.
Chef Boyardee was generally a snack or maybe a quick lunch.
This all reminds me that I inherited a bunch of old cookbooks from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and later. I should look through them and see what looks good.
And no thread of this nature would be complete without a link to James Lileks’ The Gallery of Regrettable Food.
I think most Dopers in this thread are probably well familiar with that site already, but if by chance you’re not-- WARNING: Do not click that link if you need to do anything productive for the next several hours.
Heh, true that. Although, there are times where that warning should be applied to the SDMB as a whole, especially if you find an older thread you haven’t seen before and read it from the beginning!
This almost certainly isn’t what a 1950s-era national magazine had in mind, but I toss it out in the general interest.
When I vacationed in upstate New York a couple of years ago I was surprised to se a snack bar offering “hot dogs with meat sauce”. I had to ask what the heck that was, since I hadn’t heard of it. If I’d tried the Garbage Plate at Nick Tahou’s in Rochester I’d have known, but I never went there – and this was at the other end of the state. Later on I tried some. It’s a ground beef sauce with spice – think chili dogs without chili beans or tomato sauce. Here’s a recipe:
The mysterious “1 tablespoon meat sauce” in this vintage Philadelphia Cream Cheese recipe (it’s an old printed recipe from the 1950s–1970s that was often included on the cream-cheese box or in their promotional booklets) is almost certainly **A.1. Steak Sauce**.
### Why A.1. is the correct answer:
- In that era, when a mid-century American recipe simply said “meat sauce” (especially in a savory cream-cheese dip to serve with potato chips), it was understood to mean A.1. Sauce. A.1. was far and away the most popular bottled “meat sauce”/steak sauce in the United States at the time.
- Philadelphia Cream Cheese (Kraft) and A.1. Sauce were both owned by the same company for decades, so Kraft frequently used A.1. in their corporate recipes.
- Modern reprints and community cookbook versions of this exact recipe almost always specify “1 tablespoon A.1. sauce.”
- Other possibilities that sometimes get suggested (Kitchen Bouquet, Heinz 57, HP Sauce, Worcestershire alone, etc.) don’t fit as well:
-
Kitchen Bouquet is a browning/seasoning sauce, not normally called “meat sauce.”
-
Heinz 57 is also a steak sauce, but A.1. was much more commonly referred to as “meat sauce” in period recipes.
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Worcestershire is already listed separately in the recipe (½ teaspoon), so it can’t be that.
So the ingredient is **A.1. Steak Sauce** (original flavor). Use 1 tablespoon, just as written.