A(a)h Bisto!

"It browns, seasons and thickens in one."

Aldi is about to have its British week which always throws up something nostalgic for me. This time it's Bisto, although not the Bisto that I remember. At some point they seem to have added an extra 'a' to the 'ah'. Now why would you do that? Does it show a modern taste for extremes? And I couldn't find an answer to when or why this happened.

Back in the day it was just 'ah', and it has become one of the most recognisable advertising logos that exist.

When my mother made gravy she used Bisto. It was a powder, that came in boxes or tins like the one shown below, that you sprinkled into the roasting tin, before dousing with the water from the cooked cabbage.

You then stirred it until it was warm and cooked to the right consistency. I have to say that I cringe with horror at this now, but Bisto still has some 70% of the market in the UK for gravy making products. Mind you I don't know how many people still use Bisto or something similar, or how many make their own gravy. Probably more than we foodies would like to think.

Ironically I learnt how to make 'proper' gravy from my mother-in-law, who, lovely lady that she was, was not renowned for her cooking skills. My mother, I think, was a rather better cook. She just didn't have a 'gourmet' upbringing - rather like most of the housewives of the time. Mind you I did take her cabbage water - well vegetable water - usage into my gravy making. What my mother-in-law did that was different was that she did not use any external product. She poured off most of the fat, but left some in the pan. To this was added some flour which was stirred until smooth and then she added water stirring in all the tasty stuff that had stuck to the pan along the way. Nowadays I would probably use wine to deglaze the scrapings but I do sometimes still use the water in which my vegetables were cooked. It depends what I have to hand. After all, the theory goes, all the vitamins that were in the cabbage for example, have leached out into the water. But I guess you do get the taste of the vegetable too. So it rather depends on whether you like that taste as to whether you like the finished gravy. Robert Carrier's roast turkey that we always have at Christmas, uses a stock that you make as the turkey cooks.

But back to Bisto. I couldn't actually find out a lot about it. Its company website is most uninformative. What I have comes from Wikipedia. The first thing is the quote at the top of the page, which is where it gets its name. It's a sort of acronym. I have no idea who thought of it. The product itself was invented by Messrs. Roberts and Patterson, employees of Cerebos (a big salt company), at the behest of their wives who for some reason were having difficulty making gravy. Which is not a very believable legend. Why would you not know how to make gravy? People must have discovered eons ago that if you added liquid to the remains of a roast, thickening or not thickening with something like flour, you ended up with a tasty liquid that could add yet more flavour to your meat. And I'm sure that mothers passed this down to their daughters. Sort of an oral tradition.

Bisto was invented back in 1908 and in a way you could say that it was a step backwards. A step that added an artificial product to your gravy. Yes you still got the scrapings from the roast - well if you made it in the roasting tin anyway but I'm guessing some people just mix it with water. And although it suggested that it was a beefy product, there is in fact no beef in Bisto, or any other kind of beef either.

Soon after its invention (in 1919) came the Bisto kids. The other crucial part of the Bisto image. They were an invention of Will Owen, an illustrator and artist who also was responsible for several other successful advertising campaigns. like Lux and Palmolive. These two raggedy kids seem transported by the smell of the Bisto - hence the 'ah!'. They were inseparable from the product until 1996 when they were quietly dropped.

The company itself has changed owners many times and is now part of the massive Premier Foods empire. Not only have they dropped the Bisto kids they have now apparently also dropped the actual name of Bisto. Well the articles I found that told me this were not absolutely current so this may not be quite true. They might have had to bring back the name. Certainly their website shows products with the Bisto name on them. So I'm guessing that it was just one specific campaign.

What they did was substitute Bisto with the name of a day of the week so that you got e.g 'Aah Monday'. According to the company the idea was to get families to spend at least one day of the week together over a meal. The day of the week being a subtle reminder. And they claimed, probably rightly, that the design and the retention of 'aah' was sufficient to remind people that they were, in fact buying Bisto. I suspect it was a short-lived campaign.

Nowadays Bisto comes in granules, not a powder and two grades of product - Bisto and Bisto Best. They also make ready made sauces, and sauce powders or granules. and the packaging is like the packaging in the Aldi photograph at the top of the page. All that remains is the 'aah!', the name Bisto and a somewhat stylised whisk of steam.

And, as you can see from the products shown here, they have moved into more gourmet things like red wine and red onion.

As I was writing this I asked myself what the difference was between gravy, and, say, sauce, or jus. Surely gravy - if properly made is just a thickened jus? Jus being just another name for sauce really, but often implying it is made from the juices from cooked meat, or thinner than a sauce anyway. And I know sauce is a very big umbrella term, but it probably should include gravy. But gravy, being English, is rather looked down upon I suspect unless you are being trendily retro.

I used to like the Bisto gravy of my youth, but I prefer the gravies that I make these days. I wonder if my mother continued to use Bisto, or if she too, abandoned it in favour of the scrapings from the pan and some other more gourmet liquid? But it's still being made so somebody must be using it. Which is a bit sad really.