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claims, and somehow, along with those made by Bovril, they entered the national consciousness.
    When the first Oxo cubes – as distinct from the extract – appeared, selling them can have presented no problem at all. They were so cheap that almost anybody could afford them. Baron Liebig would have been pleased. Whether he’d have been so pleased to read the list of ingredients contained in the cubes of 1985 is a matter for conjecture. But it’s as well to mention that out of the two so-called flavour enhancers listed, 621 is the suspect MSG, and the second, 635, turns out to be a combination of substances called purines, prohibited from foods intended for young children. Gout sufferers and rheumatics generally should also avoid them. In Britain that means the great majority of the population.
    Tatler , November 1985

Taking Stock
    Nearly all Englishwomen get panicky when a recipe calls for stock. Every time the word occurs in the cookery copy for a magazine or newspaper, sure as fate there’ll be a sub. on the ‘blower’ asking, can she add ‘a bouillon cube will do’? I don’t think this feeling that stock is a worrying subject is primarily a hangover from rationing. It existed, I fancy, long before the 1939 war, perhaps even before 1914. One can’t help wondering how much the cookery books of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras are to blame.
    The instructions in some of these books were enough to put off the most intrepid cook. The 1891 edition of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management (Mrs Beeton herself had died in 1865, and the instructions are emphatically not her own) told the cook that ‘everything in the way of meat, bones, gravies and flavourings that would otherwise be wasted’ should go into the stock-pot. ‘Shank-bone of mutton, gravy left over when the half-eaten legwas moved to another dish, trimmings of beefsteak that went into a pie, remains of gravies, bacon rinds and bones, poultry giblets, bones of roast meat, scraps of vegetables… such a pot in most houses should always be on the fire.’
    Heavens, what a muddy, greasy, unattractive and quite often sour and injurious brew must have emerged from that ever-simmering tub.
    There were, of course, also excellent recipes in the books for first and second stocks and broths made out of fresh ingredients, although, always with large households in mind, given in very large quantities. But somehow it was that stock-pot-cum-dustbin theory which stuck. So that gradually people have come to believe that unless they have large quantities of left-over meat and chicken carcasses, bones and scraps, it’s no use setting about making stock. It’s a good excuse too. And a shilling spent on a superior sort of bouillon cube with a continental name will, with one blow, both expunge the guilt and conceal the ignorance upon which the manufacturers and advertisers of these things are relying.
    Well, will a bouillon cube ‘do’?
    Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it will do nothing. Not, that is, if what you are hoping for is the extra stimulative value which an extract of meat is supposed to give to a soup or stew; the advantage of the extra flavour, such as it is, seems to me very doubtful.
    If it is colouring you are after, then you will get it; salt, too; plus that curious prickly after-taste which appears to be characteristic of every foodstuff in which monosodium glutamate figures. All harmless enough no doubt. And as a matter of fact I think many meat-soup substitutes are more acceptable taken straight, at times when warm liquid rather than food is what one needs, than when used in cooking.
    However, in the now remote days when nearly all basic ingredients were short, I used to use these cubes for soups, and other dishes which traditionally required stock. I even recommended some such product in a book. Too hastily. I soon found that every dish into which liquid made from a cube had entered had the same monotonous background flavour. (This would, of course,