Is There a Nutmeg in the House? Read Online Free PDF Page B

description of his extract, it was established that certain quantities of riboflavin and nicotinic acid are present in meat extracts, and that if supplemented with other proteins such as those contained in wheaten bread, could be regarded as helpful for nutritional purposes. Not much more than that, however, and not on their own. Liebig had made a faulty deduction, oddly so for a man trained in the discipline of scientific analysis. He was basing his belief mainly on the example of that trusty old warhorse, the French peasant, who lived a healthy life on a diet consisting primarily of broth, potatoes and bread. The key component of course was the bread, and the potatoes were a help. But on a diet of thin meat broth alone, the toiling peasant wouldn’t have survived for long.
    At the time of Liebig’s launch in Britain the extract’s promoters had little difficulty in gaining favourable publicity. Whatever the scientific opinion concerning its value, the product took off. Before long Florence Nightingale declared her faith in its medicinal benefits. In 1871, when Henry Stanley set out for darkest Africa in search of Livingstone, supplies of Liebig went with him. Charles Elmé Francatelli, one of the most respected chefs in Britain, gave the product his blessing. He didn’t refer to any supposed nutritional value it might have, but provided a testimonial guaranteed to appeal to cooks everywhere. ‘The very soul of Cookery is the Stockpot,’ he proclaimed solemnly, ‘and the finest Stockpot is Liebig’s Extract of Meat.’
    What more could Liebig’s advertisers ask for? Francatelli, billed at the time he wrote his testimonial as ‘chef de cuisine to the late Emperor of the French’, died in 1876, three years after his ex-Imperial Majesty. Twenty years on, the Liebig Company was still quoting the great chef’s pronouncement. Bedevilled as it was by the stockpot-worship of the period, and ever keen to dodge its tyranny, the world of middle-class professional household cooks surely greeted Francatelli’s liberating licence to forget their cauldrons of simmering meat and bones and merely dip their spoons into the Liebig jar with a collective cheer.
    The reappearance in December 1895 of Francatelli’s magisterial dictum, prominently incorporated into a full-page advertisement for Liebig’s Extract which appeared in The Epicure

    magazine for that month, was probably not unconnected with the publication the previous year of a Liebig cookery book in which every recipe except those for sweet dishes called for the inclusion of a small amount of the extract. It was now Liebig’s policy to promote its product as an aid to middle-class domestic cookery. There was no emphasis in their little book – a pretty one, and today a collectors’ item – on the nutritional virtues of the extract; the quantities advocated in the recipes were extremely restrained, reckoned mainly in quarter and half teaspoons, and the book was sent free to all who applied for it to the company’s offices. An introduction revealed something of the scale of the Liebig operation. The vast works established on the banks of the Uruguay dealt with the processing of 1,500 head of cattle a day for seven months in the year and employed over 1,000 hands.
    The publication of the Liebig cookery book was a shrewd move in what had become something of a meat extract war. As the recognised and much-bemedalled founders of a new branch of industry, the Liebig Company had attracted many imitators. Among several upstart extracts was one called Vimbos, manufactured by the Scottish Fluid Beef Company of Edinburgh. Advertisements for the product claimed a superior percentage of stimulating and flesh-forming content, plus ‘heat-producing fatty bodies and bone-forming mineral matter’. Proclaiming Vimbos the Prince of Fluid Beefs, its advertisements featured an ox squatting in a cup, its front hooves dangling forlornly over the edge. Armour & Co of Chicago produced a meat