Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Bovril
Summary
Bovril is the trademarked name of a thick and salty meat extract paste, similar to a yeast extract, developed in the 1870s by John Lawson Johnston. It is sold in a distinctive bulbous jar and as cubes and granules. Bovril is owned and distributed by Unilever UK. Its appearance is similar to the British Marmite and its Australian equivalent Vegemite; however, unlike these products, Bovril is not vegetarian.
Bovril can be made into a drink (referred to in the UK as a "beef tea") by diluting with hot water or, less commonly, with milk. It can be used as a flavouring for soups, broth, stews or porridge, or as a spread, especially on toast in a similar fashion to Marmite and Vegemite.
The first part of the product's name comes from Latin bovīnus, meaning "ox". Johnston took the -vril suffix from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's then-popular novel, The Coming Race (1871), the plot of which revolves around a superior race of people, the Vril-ya, who derive their powers from an electromagnetic substance named "Vril". Therefore, Bovril indicates great strength obtained from an ox.
In 1870, in the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III ordered one million cans of beef to feed his troops. The task of providing this went to John Lawson Johnston, a Scottish butcher living in Canada. Large quantities of beef were available across the British Dominions and South America, but transport and storage were problematic. Therefore, Johnston created a product known as 'Johnston's Fluid Beef', later called Bovril, to meet Napoleon's needs. By 1888, over 3,000 UK public houses, grocers and dispensing chemists were selling Bovril. In 1889, Bovril Ltd was formed to develop Johnston's business further.
During the 1900 Siege of Ladysmith in the Second Boer War, a Bovril-like paste was produced from horsemeat within the garrison. Nicknamed Chevril (a portmanteau of Bovril and cheval, French for horse) it was made by boiling down horse or mule meat to a jelly and serving it as a beef tea-like mixture.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.