Chicken in a creamy, savoury Marmite-and-parmesan sauce. The Marmite is hidden in the sauce, doing the long-savoury-back-note work that a slow-reduced stock would otherwise do, except this version takes twenty-five minutes start to finish. This is a proper weeknight recipe.
Marmite Articles
Explore our collection of articles about Marmite, Britain's most divisive spread.
Showing articles from: 2024 | View all articles
Marmite Vaseline lip balm: the 2007 April Fool that nearly became a real product
On 1 April, in a year I have decided not to dignify by looking up, the Marmite and Vaseline teams together announced a limited-edition product: Vaseline Lip Therapy with Marmite. Promotional materials. Quotes from brand managers. A claimed exclusive Facebook availability.
The time Paddington tried Marmite and Michael Bond was not pleased
In October 2007, Marmite released a television advert featuring Paddington Bear, made in the classic stop-motion style of the original 1970s BBC series. Paddington, in his duffle coat and hat, picks up a Marmite and cheese sandwich, tries it, and declares it "really rather good".
The Marmarati, the fake secret society Marmite invented
Marmite XO (the extra-strong, double-aged version) launched in 2010. The standard launch playbook for an extension of a heritage brand is, broadly, "advertise on television, put it in supermarkets, hope for the best". Marmite did not do that.
The countries where Marmite has been, briefly, illegal
In 2011, Denmark enforced a long-standing food regulation that requires added vitamins in commercial food products to be specifically approved by the Danish authorities. Marmite, which is fortified with extra B vitamins (B12 in particular), did not have the approval.
1984: the year Marmite changed the lid and the nation panicked
For most of its history, Marmite came with a metal screw-top lid. The lid was satisfying. It made the right sound when you opened the jar. It had heft. It felt durable, in the way that midcentury British packaging often did, and it suggested that the contents were a serious product.
Lucy Wills, Marmite, and the discovery of folic acid
Lucy Wills was an English physician who graduated from Cambridge in 1928 and went to work at the Haffkine Institute in Bombay in the early 1930s. She was particularly interested in a severe and often fatal anaemia affecting pregnant women in the Bombay textile mills. The condition was puzzling.
Marmite goes to war: the WWII workers' advertising, the Red Cross parcels, and the Burma broth
By 1916, the British Army Medical Corps had a problem. Soldiers in the trenches were developing beriberi, a nerve disease caused by thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency.
Marmite is a French word, and the jar used to be a pot
The pronunciation argument has been running for at least a hundred years. "Mar-meet" is the original French, and is, technically, correct. "Mar-might" is the British naturalisation, and is what almost everyone in Britain actually says. Both are now acceptable.
How Marmite was invented, by a German chemist and a Burton brewery
Justus von Liebig was one of the most important nineteenth-century chemists, a founder of modern organic chemistry, the namesake of the Liebig condenser still found in every undergraduate lab, and a serial inventor of food products.
