Wow-Wow Sauce

A very potent and highly unstable condiment. One of the main problems with Wow-Wow Sauce is its tendency to turn into an explosive when mixed with charcoal, the only element of gunpowder that it lacks.

The ingredients for Wow-Wow Sauce, as stated in Reaper Man, are:

• Matured Scumble
• Pickled Cucumbers
• Capers
• Mustard
• Mangoes
• Figs
• Grated Wahoonie
• Anchovy Essence
• Asafetida
• A good deal of Sulfur and Saltpeter
• The Compleat Discworld Atlas adds the information that the Vanglemesht Red Python Chili is a major ingredient.

Wow-Wow sauce is itself an ingredient in the "ultimate hangover cure" the wizards create in Hogfather. It may seem paradoxical that a sauce containing the highly alcoholic scumble could cure hangovers, but the hangover cure's ingredients (and possibly Wow-Wow sauce's ingredients too) undergo considerable chemical and magical changes. Roundworld analogy: two highly inflammable gases, hydrogen and oxygen, combine to form the fire-quenching substance water.

Archchancellor Ridcully enjoys Wow-Wow Sauce on his meals, often to an extent that most sane men who knew about the ingredients would be terrified of. He states that his uncle used to swear at Wow-Wow Sauce, and when another member of the faculty corrects him by saying, "Surely you mean by?" he concedes that his uncle might also have done that. And after drinking a whole bottle as a hangover cure, the uncle looked very peaceful when he was laid out.

A bottle of freshly-brewed sauce has, in extremis, been employed as a hand-grenade. It is thought vitally important in some cirles to keep Ridcully ignorant of the existence of Grimchi. Just in case.

There is a legal, non-lethal and decent recipe for Wow-Wow Sauce in Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, which is probably as near as legal statutes concerning manufacture and storage of explosive substances will allow anyone on Roundworld to get....