French got early taste of Bovril

REFERRING to the article “Sometimes you just have to have a taste of home”, I was amused to read that the French look upon Marmite and Bovril as proof that the English are weird.

I recommend a visit to Wikipedia's Bovril entry from which I quote:“In 1870, in the war against the Prussians, Napoleon III ordered one million cans of beef to feed his troops. the task of providing all this beef went to a Scotsman living in Canada 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.”

So, by the time it got established in England, the forerunner of Bovril had been consumed by millions of French people. Perhaps it is the short and long term outcomes of that war that gave the French their opinion of Bovril – who knows?

Simon Stevens
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