Bovril trademarked meat extract John Lawson Johnston Unilever UK drink hot water flavouring soup stew porridge bread toast
Bovril is the trademarked name of a thick, salty meat extract, developed in the 1870s by John Lawson Johnston and sold in a distinctive, bulbous jar. It is made in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, owned and distributed by Unilever UK. Bovril can be made into a drink by diluting with hot water, or less commonly with milk. It can also be used as a flavouring for soups, stews or porridge, or spread on bread, especially toast, rather like Marmite. The first part of the product's name comes from Latin bos meaning "ox" or "cow." Johnston took the -vril suffix from Bulwer-Lytton's then-popular 1870 "lost race" novel The Coming Race, whose plot revolves around a superior race of people, the Vril-ya, who derive their powers from an electromagnetic substance named "Vril." In 1870, in the war against the Prussians, Napoleon III ordered one million cans of beef to feed his starving troops. The task of providing all this beef went to a Scotsman named John Lawson Johnston. Large quantities of beef were available across the British Dominions and South America, but its transport and storage were problematic. Therefore Johnston created a product known as 'Johnston's Fluid Beef,' later called Bovril, to meet the needs of the French people and Napoleon III. By 1888, over 3,000 British public houses, grocers and chemists were selling Bovril. In 1889, the Bovril Company was formed. Bovril continued to function as a "war food" in World War I, and was frequently mentioned in the 1930 account Not So Stepdaughters of War by Helen Zenna Smith (Evadne Price). As a drink mixing the beef flavouring with hot water, it helped sustain ambulance drivers and men in trenches. A thermos of beef tea was the favoured way to fend off the chill of winter matches for generations of Scottish and English football enthusiasts; to this day Bovril dissolved in hot water is sold in stadiums all over the United Kingdom.
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Photo credit: © SOTK2011 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
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