"In cooking, a consommé is a type of soup that is similar to a very rich clarified bouillon." -- Wikipedia

Food I tried Beef Consommé for the first time today. I’d gone to Formby for the morning because I’d wanted to see what Formby looked like (like a posh Allerton Road in Liverpool as it turns out) and sometimes it’s good to see how the other half lives. As it turns out the other half shops in Waitrose because that’s the main supermarket. Ever since watching Food & Drink on television as a child and hearing from Oz Clarke that every good wine out there comes from Waitrose, I’ve often wondered what the inside of one of their golden stores looks like. It looks like a large supermarket and if you replaced the stock with any of the big three no one would probably notice.

Except -- there is a range of products which you simply can’t get at the local Tesco, at least not in Liverpool and one of those, surprisingly, is Beef Consommé. It comes in a tin with a black label with a photograph of a silver spoon superimposed on it filled with a brown liquid which you can infer is the soup (?) and a wine glass filled with a red liquid which could possible be the Waitrose Amontillado Sherry, the drink (?) is made from. Again, since Chris Kelly talked about it on the half hour eighties food programme, Beef Consommé has seemed like the height of sophistication, the connoisseur signalling that having the actual meat it not as important as the taste.

The taste is … beefy with a hint of sherry, which isn’t much of a revelation I’m sure and wasn’t for me. It’s a honey brown colour, close to black tea, and has a subtle flavour which isn’t as overpowering as OXO. The ingredients on the label say its made from a beef extract so quite how far away from the original cow this has come isn’t clear. I thought it would be thicker, more oily perhaps like Onion Soup. At no point though did I feel as though I wasn’t just sipping a high end bit of stock, I missed having bits of meat and vegetables and all the things I look forward to find floating in soap. The bits of bread which flaked in whilst I was supping way weren’t really a substitute.