WE CELEBRATE OUR TOP GRUB so tasty!
HERE’S tum thing to chew over… British Food Fortnight is celebrating our national dishes and the best of our homegrown brands.
But how much do you know about our kitchen staples? JAMES MOORE has a bite-sized guide to a cupboard full of tasty treats...
GETTING THE BIRD’S:
Birmingham chemist Alfred Bird invented a custard powder using cornflour, rather than traditional eggs, because his wife Elizabeth was allergic to them.
They served it to visitors one day and they loved it so much that Bird decided to launch it as a product in 1837.
LUCKY DIP: Liquorice Allsorts were created by accident in 1899 when employee Charlie Thompson dropped different trays of sweets he was showing a customer.
They loved the idea of selling them mixed up and a new brand was born.
NUTTY NUGGET: KP Nuts got their name from a firm started by 19th Century confectioner Charles Kenyon, later called Kenyon Produce – hence KP.
New boss Simon Heller launched the country’s first salted peanut snacks in 1953 at two pennies a packet.
BEEFING IT UP: Savvy Scots butcher John Lawson Johnston came up with a recipe for a meat extract, given the snappy name “Johnston’s Fluid Beef”, to help fulfil a huge order to feed the armies of France’s Napoleon III in 1870. Renamed Bovril, the product was also a hit at home. PIE SAY: In 1969, dairy farmer Geoffrey Ginster began baking his own pasties in an old egg-packing barn in Callington, Cornwall. On his first day he managed to make 24 of them. They proved so successful that the brand now makes three million a week. BAKING HISTORY: Tins of Lyle’s Golden Syrup have been on shelves since 1885 and bear the world’s oldest branding and packaging.
They feature a picture of a dead lion with a swarm of bees around it, cryptically chosen by religious company boss Abram Lyle and taken from a Bible passage.
RELISHED RECIPE: Branston Pickle was launched in the Staffordshire village of the same name in 1922, supposedly using a formula cooked up by a Mrs Graham and her daughters Evelyn and Ermentrude. It combined diced veg, a vinegary sauce and
various spices.
AAH! BISTO: The gravy granules have been pepping up roast dinners since 1908 when, following a request from their wives, two employees of the Cerebos Salt Company devised a recipe for a powder that would make gravy less lumpy.
SAUCY DISCOVERY: Asked to create the taste of an exotic fish sauce in 1835, Worcester-based chemists John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins thought their first effort was so vile they left it in a basement. Eighteen months on, it had matured into a delicious condiment.
POTTY START: Marmite was first made as a brewing by-product in Burton-on-Trent in 1902. It was named after a type of French cooking pot still shown on the label and was among rations for World War One troops.
SNACK OF IT: Frank Smith started selling his unsalted crisps to north London boozers from a garage behind a Cricklewood pub in 1920.
He soon had the brainwave of packaging them with a twist of salt to create the first salt ’n shake crisps.