Richard Crampton Platt

Nations are built from eating habits as well as masterpieces. In Britain, there’s one that is both: Bovril. This thick, salty meat extract paste may not be as wise as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, as beguiling as Rossetti’s ‘Proserpine’, or as symbolic of greatness as the Palace of Westminster – and yet it has a clear place among our nation’s intangible cultural assets. As both a spread and a drink, Bovril may be just a wartime ration, a tonic for invalids or a companion on football terraces but it still marks a serious, if ordinary, contribution to our common life.  That contribution, however, may now be under threat.

Men who cook Spanish omelettes look a bit gay. Or at least that is how American film executives reacted to Harry Palmer cooking in The Ipcress File. The cable said: ‘Dump Michael Caine’s spectacles and make the girl cook the meal. He is coming across as a homosexual.’ This was 1964, when London was the cultural centre of the Swinging Sixties. In the final cut, Palmer asks what she will report back about him. She replies simply: ‘That you like girls … you also like books, music, cooking.’ The Americans had misread the moment. This was a modern heterosexual man, self-sufficient, urban, and quietly competent, but one whose lifestyle still had to be explained.