The rise of the stock cube

Before the stock cube, gravy without a roast meant either homemade stock or nothing.

Liebig's extract¶

The German chemist Justus von Liebig developed a concentrated meat extract in the 1840s, intended originally as a cheap nutritional supplement for the poor and the sick. Producing it required enormous quantities of beef, which made it uneconomic in Europe.

The solution was geographic: the Liebig Extract of Meat Company, founded in 1865, processed cattle at Fray Bentos in Uruguay, where beef was abundant and hides were the main commercial product. The meat was, in effect, a by-product.

Oxo¶

Liebig's extract was marketed in Britain under the name Oxo from 1899 as a liquid, and as a cube from 1910. The cube was the breakthrough: cheap, shelf-stable, portioned and requiring only hot water.

Oxo was sold hard as a hot drink and a nutritional aid as much as a cooking ingredient — it was supplied to troops in the First World War and marketed relentlessly to households through the twentieth century.

Maggi and the vegetable cube¶

Julius Maggi in Switzerland developed pulse-based flavourings from the 1880s and launched a bouillon cube in 1908. The Maggi and Knorr lines established the vegetable and chicken cube alongside the beef one.

What it did to gravy¶

The stock cube made gravy without drippings a normal domestic possibility. Combined with gravy browning and, from 1908, Bisto, it meant a household could have dark, savoury gravy on a Tuesday with a chop.

It also, arguably, set the modern British expectation that gravy should taste salty and strongly savoury rather than meaty — because that is what a cube delivers.

What it cannot do¶

A stock cube supplies salt and flavour compounds. It does not supply gelatin, which is what gives real stock its body. This is why cube gravy needs more flour to feel substantial. See gelatin from bones and stock cubes.

See also¶

• stock cubes · bisto · instant gravy granules · gravy without drippings