The Magic Cube

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It's the natural ingredients and rich flavor of Nor that brings people together.

You may never have heard of any of these products, Maggie, nor Oxo, but they are some of the most popular ingredients in the entire world.

They are brown, they are savory, they are salty and delicious, and they are everywhere.

We're talking about stock cubes, or pullion if you prefer, industrial brown umami glute or powder.

So, how did these concentrated umami bombs become a universal ingredient?

And what does the story of the invention of all these products have to do with the chemist who was the first to insist that protein helps build strong muscles and with magical people who live on electricity?

Plus, how did the invention of these meat extracts lead to the creation of the iconic, love-it-or-hate it, toast toppers, marmite, and begemite?

Today's story starts, as so many good stories do, with a German chemist.

Christus von Liewig was one of the people who kind of invented modern chemistry as a field.

And his contributions are vast in laboratory science, in agriculture, in nutrition.

And once again, we have the wonderful flavor historian Nadia Berenstein on the show.

And for the purposes of today's episode, Liebig's contributions to agriculture are not the most important.

We're interested in his nutrition science.

At the time, in the 1800s, scientists were hard at work trying to understand what the heck food actually was.

This is kind of what chemists were up to back then in the 19th century.

They were like, there's all of this stuff in the world, what is it made of?

Let's figure it out and name it.

Not just name it, but decide which bits of it were essential.

Chemists were trying to break food down into its elemental parts and understand exactly which parts we needed to survive.

In the 1830s, scientists named and identified protein and they found it particularly fascinating.

Why not just keep breaking things down?

That was the trend at the time.

And scientists had noticed that different protein-rich foods seem to be made up of slightly different building blocks.

These are what we call amino acids today.

If you think about proteins as molecules, I mean, most of us aren't thinking about proteins as molecules, but if you imagine it, it's a sort of long molecule that's composed of a lot of different component parts, some of which are amino acids.

And what hydrolysis is, is is basically this process of blasting that big molecule apart into these constituent pieces.

This is in fact exactly what Liebig did, hydrolysis.

He took hydrochloric acid and used it to break down or dissolve meat and then figure out what the different kinds of amino acids were.

Liebig's big breakthrough was identifying one particular amino acid, creatine, which he then also found in the muscles of living animals.

He found it in especially high levels in the muscles of a fox that had had died while it was running.

And that's what led him to the conclusion that creatine was the key to muscle action.

People had been claiming that meat was important for health for a really long time, but Liebig's contribution was to show, at least based on his science at the time, that the protein in meat was critical for muscles, and so it was an essential component of a nutritious diet.

Liebig went as far as to say that the protein element of food was the only true nutrient.

Meat was it.

So when his friend's daughter came down with typhoid, Liebig knew exactly what she needed: meat.

But she was too sick to digest solid foods.

So Liebig took some cooked chicken, he grounded it up, he soaked it in hydrochloric acid to dissolve it, all to get at what he thought was the critical creatine.

Then he added another chemical to neutralize the acid and turn it into table salt.

And then he gave the young girl this salty, savory broth.

And she recovered.

And this led to what became one of his most popular discoveries at the time.

Liebig was able to use chemistry to create a modern version of beef tea.

Beef tea had been popular with the sensitive and the sickly for a few decades.

The idea was that invalids who were too delicate to eat a great big steak could still get all its goodness by boiling that steak in water, straining it, and then drinking the resulting meat juice.

Basically, the idea is:

if you're sickly, if you're wasting away with

any of the numerous diseases that may have afflicted the Dickensian populace in the mid-19th century.

What you want to do is to

get an easily and readily absorbable source of strengthening food, of protein.

Liebig's was different from traditional beef tea.

He didn't need to boil meat for hours to break it down.

He could use hydrochloric acid.

To Liebig, this meant he could keep in more of the good stuff from meat in the broth.

He thought boiling it was less effective.

So Liebig's beef tea was kind of this concentrate, this sort of hydrolyzed, blasted apart beef proteins made into a liquid broth that sickly little orphans and delicate women could sip and thus be on the way to restoring their health.

Liebig published his beef tea formula and it quickly became all the rage with fragile elites searching for something to pep up their delicate constitution.

Pharmacists would make up a big batch and evaporate it and sell it under the name Extractus carnus, extract of meat.

It was classified as a legal drug in Germany.

In fact, it was considered so essential that pharmacists were required to keep it in stock.

Doctors reported that Liebig's formula for extractus carnis could be useful for tuberculosis, typhus, various stomach derangements, and scropula.

One doctor said it could be a useful substitute for brandy in cases of exhaustion, depression, and despondency.

I'd rather have a brandy.

But the point is, Liebig's high-tech version of beef tea was a wonder drug in the 1850s.

It was thought of as a way to give the goodness of muscle-forming meat to the weak and puny.

And this was of particular interest to Brits at the time because, well, people were concerned that Brits were getting weaker and punier.

So British government, British elites felt that the country was in decline because its population was no longer eating sufficiently well.

Leslie Steinitz is a historian at Cambridge University.

And they had a lot of data to back this up.

The 19th century was the beginning of the era.

We still do it hugely, but it was the beginning of the era of counting everything.

There were censuses, there were surveys, and all of these things seemed to show that the British men were getting punier, the women were being less fertile, were having fewer babies.

Lots of children were dying very young.

There was a lot of child mortality.

So all of these things together were creating a huge crisis of confidence, which left a gap for something for the British people to believe in.

And the thing they believed in was beef.

They'd always loved beef and Liebig's new research backed them up.

But where did this beef obsession come from?

Now you're asking about my favorite subject.

So beef, like now, if you talk about steak to a lot of men, beef is the, it's man food.

We talked about this in our recent Moodanit episode.

Brits believed that beef was responsible for expanding their empire.

It made them strong.

It made them British.

While the British ate more beef per capita than just about anyone else in Europe and continued to do so, many or most of the British people couldn't afford meat.

And so this was a cultural ideal, but it wasn't something that people got to eat very often, but it was something they aspired to.

Liebig dreamed of using his beef tea as a way to get the wonders of beef to everyone who needed it, but there was a problem.

There just weren't enough cows in Europe to supply the poor with the amount of flesh-forming protein that was considered necessary, even in tea form.

Worse, there was a big outbreak of a cattle plague in 1865, and 100,000 British cows died.

But Liebig knew there were a lot of cows in South America.

So think of South America and pampas, of Argentina and Uruguay, where there's just a ton of cattle happily or semi-happily or perhaps unhappily grazing.

That meat source, those steaks, that nutrition is pretty hard in, you know, Liebig's time, 1850, 1860s, to transport to Britain.

There's a big leather industry because you can tan leather and you can ship it around the world, but the meat that is on these, you know, leather cows in Uruguay and Argentina is hard to get anywhere else.

Because, wait for it, there was no refrigeration.

So, a lot of this beef was simply waste.

The main product at that time of the cattle was their leather and the tallow.

Leslie says a lot of that wonderful, flesh-forming meat was just left to rot.

And so, a German industrialist who'd been building roads and railways in Brazil read about Liebig's work and got the idea that cows in South America could be converted to Liebig's beef extract and shipped that way.

He wrote to Liebig, and they set up a shop in Uruguay.

And they build a factory there to process these hundreds of carcasses of oxen and cattle that are being raised for leather and basically to turn these carcasses into this portable, packageable, containable extract of beef.

In the lab, Liebig had used the modern wonders of chemistry, specifically hydrochloric acid, to extract the essence of beef.

But that wasn't feasible on an industrial scale back then.

Instead, to create his extract of beef in a factory, workers started by squishing cattle carcasses into a pulp using steam-powered rollers.

They dropped that pulp into hot water and steamed it for an hour, and then they skimmed off the solids and evaporated the remaining liquid into a dark brown glue.

They claimed that for every kilogram of extract, they had concentrated the what they called the food value of 34 kilograms of meat.

So basically, every 34 pounds of beef can be reduced to this brown, viscous, savory,

soupy fluid that can then be put on a boat and sent to England.

And though it might sound weird, this viscous, savory, soupy, brown meat extract became a huge hit with everyone.

Now it was affordable.

It was quite popular.

And I think possibly the first time that a new food product that was named after a chemist

like made it

made it in the market.

It was especially popular among people in nursing and people in the military.

So Florence Nightingale brought along a bunch of Liebig's extract of meat when she was tending to soldiers who were wounded in the Crimean War.

Henry Stanley, who went looking for Doctor Livingston in in Central Africa, you know, the Doctor Livingston, I presume, guy, brought a bunch of Liebig's extract of meat in his supplies when he went exploring in the backcountry of Africa.

So basically, it was seen as this, accepted really, as this

wholesome, good substance, health-giving, strength-building, strength-maintaining substance that could conveniently be packaged into a little jar.

Florence Nightingale and Henry Stanley were early adopters, but straight away there were some doubters.

One scientist who analyzed Liebig's extract of beef in his lab said it was, quote, like the play of Hamlet without the character of Hamlet.

Liebig's extract of meat seemed to be missing the meat.

It turns out that this central claim, the thing that Liebig's extract of meat is promising to do, which is to, you know, give you all the goodness of the cow in a much smaller package, was actually not true at all.

One of the experiments that sort of investigated these claims, they took a group of dogs and they fed them only on Liebig's extract of beef and they all starved to death.

So obviously there's something missing here, right?

And it turns out that when you actually do a nutritional analysis of Liebig's product, it doesn't really have very much protein or fat at all.

It has very few calories.

It's basically just a taste, a flavor.

The missing meat wasn't Liebig's only problem.

At the same time that Liebig was commercializing his big protein idea, other scientists had continued breaking down food and trying to figure out what it was made of, and they started to argue that other parts of food like carbohydrates were important too.

Maybe even more important, the science of nutrition was progressing so fast that everything was still kind of up in the air.

But Liebig wasn't ready to give up.

Okay, his extract of meat wasn't exactly the same as meat, and maybe meat wasn't the only thing you needed in your diet, but that didn't mean his extract of meat wasn't important nutritionally.

That savoriness and the taste of meat was also thought to be critical because, the theory went, it would affect how well you could absorb the nutrients in your food.

Essentially, one of the ideas at the time was that it's not just the food that you consume that matters, but how well you're able to absorb it.

Because yet, other scientists in the 1800s were doing a lot of research on digestion.

And showing that the anticipation of something delicious causes all of these physiological changes in your body, this cascade of like fluids flowing within you that prepare your body to assimilate the proteins, the fats, the starches that you then consume.

So Liebig kind of repositions his product in part as this

health food because it's a food that sparks appetite.

A truly impressive pivot.

In just a couple of decades, Liebig's extract of meat had gone from a medical product essential to human life to being a convenient and affordable ingredient that made food taste better.

And so sales of Liebig's extract of meat continued apace.

But the fact that it didn't actually have any meat in it did open the door for a competitor brown gloop.

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Hot feet beep barrel puts

So Bovril was beef extract which Liebig had invented.

But it also added the thing that Liebig's extract was hugely criticised for not containing.

So bovril

also contained dried ground meat mixed in with beef extract.

Bovril was invented in the 1870s by a Scot named John Lawson Johnston.

Grew up somewhere in the Highlands of Scotland until as a young boy, he was adopted by his uncle who was a butcher, who had a shop in Edinburgh.

just a mile or two down the road down the hill from the amazing um castle john John Lawson Johnston worked in his uncle's butcher's shop, but he also somehow snuck into lectures at Edinburgh University, where he learned a little about Liebig's exciting new discoveries in chemistry and nutrition.

And somehow he got a commission from the French government to produce a preserved nutritious food for the French troops.

And he came up with this product which he made his own, a brown liquid gloupe that you could add to hot water.

Originally, John named his invention sort of the way Liebig did.

He called it Johnston's Fluid Beef, but then he came up with something much more creative.

The first part, Bov, that came from Bovine, like cattle.

Vrill instead came from a novel by Edward Bulwer-Litton called Vrill, the power of the coming race.

It was a very, very popular proto-science fiction novel.

The Vrillia were people who lived underground and had this amazing, astonishing civilization fueled by a power called Vril.

It was an electricity-like power, and Vrill was used to grow their plants.

They had these sticks and they could fly around.

The marvelous thing about this society was the women were in charge.

So this Vrill was sort of an energetic thing.

And I think that this name, the bovine, represented the protein, the Brill represented the stimulant, the energy.

A powerful combination and a very effective marketing message, which is something that Bovril became known for.

It was advertised in a way which was absolutely spectacular and very different for the period.

John Wilson Johnson himself was quite a showman.

One of the innovations was to put the huge word bovril on top of buildings in top London landmarks.

So Piccadilly Circus is very famous for that.

There was a huge bovril sign in the sky, which after a while was lit up, so very modern with electricity.

Later he hired a super famous bodybuilder to be the face of the product.

He used Eugene Sandal, who was the strong man and great pin-up of the era, as one of the people to endorse the product.

During the First World War, he used semi-naked bodies of armaments workers as the personification of the man strengthened by bovril.

After all, Liebig had, quote, proven that beef builds muscles, so it makes sense that bovril would be advertised on the basis of strong naked men.

It's kind of like how protein powders are marketed today.

John Lawson Johnston had originally developed his product for the French army, if you remember, and the French and the British were not the best of friends at the time, so John temporarily moved to Quebec.

Montreal had these winter fairs where they built an ice palace and people would flood into the ice palace and see lots of different things.

And Johnson set up his stall with these women, these wenches, and huge, great big urns of steaming hot bovril and was pouring it out into cups for people to buy.

Bovril took the Montreal Winter Fair by storm because just a few years before John showed up with his beefy broth, Canada had introduced Prohibition.

And it turned out that this savory drink was strangely a popular replacement replacement for booze.

After a factory fire, John sold his Canadian business and moved back to Britain to London, where he put on the same show.

At the 1887 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, he built another ice palace and employed fur-clad ladies to serve hot bovril.

And even though Britain never introduced prohibition, there was a big temperance movement at the time, and bovril caught on as a non-alcoholic alternative in pubs and bars.

Why?

I have no idea.

There are some mysteries that even gastropod cannot solve, but in any case, this is a time that all sorts of intense, brown, concentrated, savory substances were catching on.

Not just Bovril and Lee Biggs' extract of meat, but also another one that's really popular today called Maggie.

At least that's how we're going to pronounce it.

There are some places in the world where it's pronounced Maggie.

It was invented in Switzerland.

Julius Maggie was a Swiss mill owner, right?

So he's a capitalist, but he's also a philanthropist.

And he looks at the women, many women who work at his factory.

He looks at chronic malnutrition in his community.

He looks at the high rates of infant mortality, but he also knows that meat

is an elite food, that it's not going to be accessible.

The science of nutrition has showed him that beans, pulses, peas are sources of protein just like beef.

So Julius made his own bean-based protein extract.

It was genius, really.

He realized that he could use Liebig's hydrochloric acid trick to break down the proteins in vegetables, too.

That way, he could start with something cheap, like peas, and end up with the same fabulous amino acids that Liebig was getting from more expensive beef.

This was the first vegetable-based umami bomb.

It was first a liquid, but then in 1908, Maggie introduced the very first bullion cube.

He'd evaporated the liquid into a powder and then smushed it into a cube and wrapped it in foil.

Even more convenient.

Maggie's cube was quickly followed by the bullion cube of my youth, OXO, which was the cheaper, cubier version of Liebig's extract of meat.

To the question, is it chicken oxo that brings out the flavor of chicken or chicken that brings out the flavor of chicken oxo?

There is no answer.

One brings out the flavor of the other.

It's a little like asking which came first, the chicken.

Or the cube.

And that was joined by Noor, which was another veggie-based stock cube invented in Germany.

And around the same time, another brown gloop was invented, and I know this one has a great deal of personal meaning to you, Nikki.

Marmite.

So I should say that despite my long personal relationship with Marmite, I did not realize that it started life like all these other gloops as a concentrated base for a hot brothy drink.

I feel as though maybe our relationship was built on a lie.

Australians would be pissed if we left off their round gloop of choice, which is Vegemite.

We're happy little veggie mites, as bright as bright can be.

We all enjoy our veggie mite for breakfast, lunch, and tea.

To be honest, Vegemite was invented because the food manufacturer wanted an Australian version of the British Marmite when Marmite wasn't available right after World War I.

Both are made from yeast that's left over from brewing beer, yet another cheap source of savory protein.

So, basically, in this period of time at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, which is really the dawn of a mass market for industrialized food, there's just this kind of, I don't know if it's right to call it a glut, but there are a whole lot of products that are suddenly available to buy that give you the savoriness of a slow-cooked stew in a bottle.

So it's basically, you know, taking this labor-intensive cooking process.

And instead of, you know, even though it started out by promising this kind of nutritional revolution or this way of kind of delivering necessary protein and strength in a small package, kind of taking this slow-cooked slow-cooked flavor and making it immediately accessible.

The thing that unites all of these small, savory packages is that they are savory.

And that savoriness comes from blasted-apart proteins.

What Liebig and other chemists would call hydrolyzed proteins.

Some of which are quite tasty, specifically glutamate, which we register as the taste sensation that we now know as umami.

You can get that wonderful, savory, umami sensation from broken-down proteins in a lot of foods, cooked and browned meat and parmesan cheese, or fermented foods like fish sauce, miso, soy sauce.

Or if you're an industrial food manufacturer with a big factory, you can create it by hydrolyzing the proteins in really cheap ingredients like corn and soybeans.

Same great umami taste.

But strangely, even though humans had been enjoying the taste of umami since, well, probably since they figured out how to use fire to cook meat, umami was only recognized as an official taste in 1990.

Meaning that it couldn't be replicated or imitated adequately with using other chemicals that have taste properties by, say, combining saltiness and sweetness.

It had a distinct set of molecular mechanisms so scientists could identify how it was being experienced on a molecular level in the body and other criteria like that.

This is Sarah Tracy.

She's a historian and she's writing a history of umami.

And she says part of the reason it took scientists so long to recognize umami as a distinct taste is that we still don't really understand exactly why we taste it.

We talked about this in our taste episode.

There are theories for why we taste the things we do, like sweetness, that's for calories, and salt, our bodies need it, and we can't make it.

The kind of oversimplified or straightforward explanation for why umami is that it seems to be often correlated with or strong umami flavor.

seems to accompany proteins.

So the idea, at least from an evolutionary biology interpretation, is that we taste umami to incentivize us to eat essential protein, much like we taste sweetness and seem to intrinsically be drawn to sweetness right from infancy because we need calories from carbohydrates.

So that sounds really sensible, it sounds really rational.

But not all scientists agree that this makes sense.

Because there are all kinds of naturally occurring food products and substances that we consume regularly for their umami power or capacity that have little or even sometimes no protein, like nutritional value to them.

For example, tomatoes.

Tomatoes are very high in free glutamic acid, meaning that the glutamate is running around separated from a larger protein chain, meaning that our taste buds, our taste receptors can actually get at the glutamate.

Tomatoes are very low in protein.

In other words, tomatoes taste very umami-ish, but they are not flesh-forming at all.

Hence the mystery.

We don't seem to have a single coherent theory for why it is that umami tastes so good and why so many beloved foods are very rich in this taste.

Whatever the reason, we humans love and crave this umami flavor.

It's really a big part of why all these umami-rich gloups and powders became so immediately popular.

And another reason they were also pretty easy to manufacture.

I think a lot of the presence of broken down proteins in our food supply comes almost by accident, and it's because other manufacturing processes left these wastes lying around.

So, for example, marmite, the beloved condiment spread, which is very high in umami, is an accidental byproduct or a waste product, co-product, we could call it of brewing.

As we said, marmite and Vegemite are made from the savory yeast left over from brewing beer.

The enzymes the yeast produce while they're digesting grain and turning it into alcohol, those enzymes break down the yeast's own cell walls.

They kind of self-implode, which leaves leftover umami-rich dead yeast cells.

Which I love to spread on my toast.

Yum.

Wherever they come from, these hydrolyzed proteins are cheap, they're concentrated and shelf-stable, they're quick and easy to use, and they make everything taste savory and more delicious.

So it's not surprising that as food production started to become more industrialized, manufacturers turned to this yummy hydrolyzed protein to make everything better.

Its enormous value to food producers was that it was able to mitigate for the loss of flavor that came from packaging and processing and heat treating and canning different foods.

So it was like a corrective for all the bummer things about an industrialized food supply.

So we could, again, have our cake and eat it too.

Our food could be shelf-stable and it could be affordable, but it could also be delicious thanks to food science.

So you see them in a lot of different products under different names on the ingredient label.

Yeast extract is a common one.

Do you see them in like chips, other snack foods, definitely in canned soups?

They just kind of make everything taste richer and more savory, more mouth-filling.

These delicious concentrates haven't just changed the food on the shelves, they've also changed the way we cook and the way we eat all around the world.

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You know, people talk about industrial taste or like the way that industrialization, the industrialization of food has

changed our palates or changed what there is that's available to savor.

And I think that this is one of the major ways that that happened.

Like suddenly, you don't have to stir the stew pot for hours anymore.

You can just drop a cube of OXO.

Something that started out as almost a medical product, Liebig's extract of meat was sold in pharmacies and championed by Florence Nightingale, had ended up being transformed into an industrial flavor and a kitchen shortcut.

In fact, it's not just an industrial flavor, it's almost the industrial flavor.

This concentrated, salty, umami richness forms the backbone of what we eat.

It's transformed what we expect from packaged foods, and it's transformed home cooking too.

Liebig's extract of meat, the product that started this all, that that actually isn't manufactured anymore.

But its cheaper stock cube version, the OXO cube, is still super popular in the UK.

And of course, Marmite and Bovril are too.

Although like I said, these days they're more commonly found on toast and as a hot drink rather than used as an ingredient in cooking.

That said, I lived on Marmite sauce on spaghetti at university.

But two products that were launched around the same time as OXO and Marmite have really taken hold in kitchens, basically almost everywhere, and that's Nora and Maggie.

So I've probably been tasting Maggie in food since I was like two or three years old.

My mom has always used Maggie cubes in our stews and soups.

She uses them in like beans dishes.

I think every Nigerian or most West African households use Maggie in majority of their dishes.

You can go to the most remote village in Nigeria and they still will have Maggie cubes or somebody selling Maggie cubes there somehow.

Try Maggie chicken, irresistible chickeny aroma, perfect chicken colour and rich chicken-me taste.

Mmm!

Chickeny!

Maggie chicken, the taste of celebration!

Simi Adebajo is the head chef and owner of Echo Kitchen in San Francisco.

And we called her up to ask how people in Nigeria use Maggie Cubes.

So mostly people incorporate Maggi in their food simply by crumbling it inside the cooking pot and you let it cook with the dish for about five, ten minutes just to enhance the flavor.

I've seen some people literally crumble maggie directly on their plate of food, like you would like add like a shake of salt or pepper, but I personally don't do that, but it's also used in that way too.

Maggie is popular throughout Africa, not just in Nigeria.

In Senegal, it's even given Maggie.

So it ended in Nigeria as Maggie.

Pierre Tiam is a chef.

His restaurant chain in New York City is called Taranga, and he founded Yolele Foods to import West African ingredients to the US.

But in Senegal, it's used in pretty much every single dish.

Every sauce, every soup, every now national dish,

you would have Maggie in it.

Tebudien is a fish, tomato, and rice dish.

It also has onions, carrots, cassava, and other ingredients, and basically, officially now, Maggie cubes.

Maggie has achieved total domination in West Africa.

But in Mexico, the most popular bolien is nor.

They call it nor suiza.

Gabriela Lendo works for cooking companies in Spain now, but she grew up in Mexico and she learned how to cook from a woman who worked for her family.

And that meant learning to sprinkle in nor.

I guess the first time I remember using nor is we were making albondillas.

Albondigas de carne in a tomato sauce.

So this is meatballs.

And towards the end, when she added the water, she would taste it, she would add the salt, and she would always do like a little teaspoon of nor suiza.

And I remember she, at that moment, she told me, whenever a sauce tastes flat, just add the nor and it will give it a sort of a bigger depth to it.

And it's true.

Gabriela told us, once you start looking, nor shows up everywhere in Mexican home cooking.

Honestly, I do believe it's a guilty secret.

You'll never find it in traditional recipe books.

Chicharron en sal salverde is another like typical example where nor suiza is used.

And chicharron en salsa verde is like pork rinds in

green tomato and chili sauce.

And I would say that most Mexican cooks always end up using a little bit of nor.

to give it an extra oomph, I guess.

So yeah.

Nor first arrived in Mexico in 1961, and Maggie took over Africa a little earlier in the 50s.

But basically, the 50s and 60s were a time of world expansion and the beginnings of a global empire for concentrated bullion.

India joined the Universal Hydrolyzed Protein Party a little later because the country didn't open up to overseas companies until later.

But even though Maggie was only introduced to India in the 1980s, Maggie products have since thoroughly embedded themselves in Indian culture and cuisine.

They are a big deal.

I would say the noodles and the Maggie Hot and Sweet ketchup are the two

biggest lines produced by that company in India.

It's different.

It's different.

It's different.

It's different.

Maggie Tomato ketchup, always different.

The number of flavors that you can get within the noodles is crazy.

And I remember as a kid, they even had a contest where people would submit pitches for noodles flavors.

And so it was this mass marketer-driven campaign that would show up every Sunday, I think after the the Disney cartoons would end.

Because kids loved the noodles too.

Nick Sharma is a writer and cookbook author.

His most recent book that just came out is called The Flavor Equation.

And Nick remembers what it was that he loved as a kid in India about Maggie noodles.

You've got savory, you've got a little bit of sweet, you've got a little bit of sour, all those elements are built up with salt, and it all comes together in this delicious package where you're enticed.

And I know when I eat Maggie noodles, I can feel my the taste receptors on my tongue just craving more.

What makes Maggie noodles so irresistible to Nick is the flavor of the powder of the bullion.

In the US, you might find chicken, beef, or vegetable flavor stock cubes, but there are dozens of Maggie and Noor flavorings adapted for every different country.

You can get Maggie crayfish flavor, and Maggie hibiscus and onion flavor, and Maggie masala.

I haven't lost a magic touch.

It's not you, Dad.

It's Maggie.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie.

So, Maggie's taste is kind of

salty,

sweet.

And depending on what type of Maggie cube you have, because there are different flavor profiles, you can have shrimp Maggie, chicken Maggie, beef Maggie.

So, depending on what flavor you have, it will kind of have a tinge of,

I guess, the gaminess related to the flavor as well.

Simi says that when Maggie first came to Nigeria the company marketed its cubes as a way to cook more like white people did.

It was kind of encouraging Nigerians and locals that if they use these cubes in their cooking they could be held to the standard of their colonial masters and so it's like I use these cubes and you can be more sophisticated use these cubes and you can be like the white man.

And that was the beginning of the marketing of the Maggie cubes in Nigeria.

But over time, they now started to realize that obviously they needed localized content because really Nigerians couldn't relate to what they were trying to sell.

And so they started using market women and women who cooked at canteens in public spaces to advertise these cubes and a huge marketing strategy that Maggie used and they would give the restaurant owner a free signboard to put in front of of their restaurant that had the Maggie logo on it, but the name of the person's restaurant.

So there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of restaurants, small restaurants in Nigeria, or Bukas, as Nigerians know them, with a Maggie signboard in front, which is very good covert marketing for Maggie.

In fact, for its Nigerian market, Maggie has even created a mini TV series, Yellow Pepe, which follows the journey of five women.

Tagline: drama is served.

I want to pursue this seriously.

Food blocking.

You will find a job that pays your rent.

Hi, Dominic Caesar, food and beverage manager for restaurant dos or dues.

Claude is our new boss.

Spicy.

No spoilers, but we have got the link on our website if you need some savory drama in your life.

Gabriela says that in Mexico, Nora also targeted women.

I can't remember a specific ad, but I do kind of remember like the aura of the ads.

They were definitely targeted to home cooks, mothers, young mothers.

With this

mom offering a warm bowl of chicken soup, you could even see

the steam coming out of the bowl, no?

So the hominess and the don't worry if you don't have time to do your chicken stock

from scratch.

Facides de prepararo y muya económicas.

Mami, aimas.

Donde esta nor solo ayalados para mamar.

You can still do what in Mexico is like super traditional sopa deltra.

Alphabet soup, just like mom made.

Thanks, Nor.

And remember how John Lawson Johnston hired a super famous bodybuilder to pimp Bavril?

Well, the tactic must have been a good one.

Maggie did the same with wrestling in Senegal.

Because wrestling is a national sport in Senegal, and the champion wrestlers were all sponsored by Maggie.

The big games, soccer games, sponsored by Maggie.

Basically, huge chunks of the world have been magified at this point.

And if they haven't been magified, they've been gnawed.

But Pierre and Simi told us that before Maggie showed up in West Africa, they had their own traditional fermented sources of delicious umami flavor.

Maggie is the shortcut, you know, for recipes that used to have other ingredients like, you know, our fermented, we use a lot of fermentation in our cuisine.

So those fermented flavors that we would get from dawah native to, you know, fermented conch, you know, sometimes you don't use them anymore because those ingredients either, you know, they

have a strong flavor, they're fermented.

So people, instead of having to use those strong flavors, prefer to just have the maggie, which is a shortcut.

I said that's what's been happening, you know.

So

we see the disappearance of some of those traditional ingredients.

because Maggie is taking over.

Pierre told us about Dawa Dawa, which is fermented locust bean that he uses as a source source of umami.

Simi cooks with that too, but she said it can be kind of a hassle.

While indigenous spices are very, one, easy to source and you know have very interesting umami flavors, they're not easy to process.

So there's a lot of processing, washing, sorting that goes from the point you get the spice from nature to actually using it in the cooking pot.

And with Maggie, you literally just unwrap the foil wrapping around the cube and crumble it into the pot, and you can get a similar effect.

So, I think that's why Maggie kind of gained popularity so quickly.

It's just the ease, the convenience of using it.

Which is a compelling reason, especially for the people who would otherwise be spending hours processing these traditional ingredients.

That said, Pierre told us that replacing traditional sources of umami with a Maggi cube is not necessarily a win-win.

So much is lost, it's a tradition that goes away.

And in addition to this tradition, is the biodiversity.

Dawadawa comes from a tree, a sustainable tree that grows in poor soil, that brings this fruit called Nere,

and the seed of the fruit.

That's what we use to take it and ferment it into what becomes Dawadawa.

And if it's not used anymore, if there's no market for it anymore, it disappears.

Of course, Pierre does use Maggie now.

You know, I do cook with Maggie and I still cook with Dawadawa as well.

I use both of them, you know, and Maggie, like it can be a shortcut.

Dawadawa is not readily available everywhere.

I'm working on bringing it with my company, Yolele, in the market to have it accessible here in the US.

But at the moment, the Maggie will do.

So at my restaurant, I use a mix of both.

I was exposed to the traditional seasonings as well as Maggie growing up.

And so that's reflected in my dishes.

I use Iru, which is the fermented locust beans, a lot at the restaurant because I think there is literally no flavor on earth, nothing on earth that can really replicate the flavors that Iru brings to a dish.

So I try to use that in some of our entrees.

And I also use Maggie as well, just because there is this flavor that Maggie brings, especially to dishes like Jollof Rice, that I really can't replicate with other seasoning blends.

In some ways, Maggie has become authentic.

It's the flavor that Simi grew up with after all.

Nick told us the same thing.

I would say it is an integral part of the culture.

Obviously, not everyone does it.

It's not like a rule that's applied to everyone, but I would say,

at least in my mom's community, it is a part of the recipes.

Like even now when I look at recipes that my mom or relatives or friends from the community send me,

they'll have Maggie soup cubes written.

Or they'll say like a Nor, like I've inherited my grandmother's cookbook, and she passed away a decade ago, and in it, it says Nor, soup cubes.

And so, to me, I would probably go back just because of that.

Taste is so

spot-on to what she was making.

It completes it for me.

Nick may be a professional cook, and he does sometimes make stock from scratch, but he doesn't blame you if you keep some stock gloop or cubes around.

He does too.

If there's a shortcut that exists and it works well, go for it.

I'm not going to judge anyone, and I don't expect to be judged.

I have my own personal bullion favorite.

I am never without a jar of the vegetarian version of Better Than Bullion.

It's a brown gloopy stock paste, and I adore it, and I add it gleefully to savory soups and dishes all the time.

I told my mom, and now she always has a jar, too.

I too am never without better than bullion, and, of course, a jar of Marmite.

Thanks this episode to Nadia Berenstein, Leslie Steinet, Sarah Tracy, Nick Sharma, Pierre Tiam, Simi Adebajo, and Gabriela Lendo.

We have links to their work and books and restaurants on our website, gastropod.com.

And a special thanks to listener and supporter Jenny Raymond for suggesting that we should make an episode about Maggie Cubes.

Plus, as always, huge thanks to our superstar Gastropod Fellow, Sonia Swanson.

We'll be back in two weeks.

Till then.

On the 12th day of Christmas, my maggie can do it.

Seven peppers.

Six, six, six, five.

Five, fries

Four cocoa bangers, three party jollos, two giz dudu, five

with a mousse