Portable soup sounds like a joke, rather like instant water or stew on a stick. After all, what soup isn’t portable? However, in the mid eighteenth century, the term portable soup arose to denote a foodstuff made by boiling meat until all that was left was a thick, syrupy resin that could be dried and stored for months at a time. The process was time-consuming: Hannah Glasse, in her 1747 book called The Art of Cookery, said that the meat should be boiled “until it was good for nothing,” that is, until it had dissolved into specks. Another author, Mrs. Beeton in her 1861 Beeton’s Book of Household Management, was a bit more specific: she advised housewives to boil the meat for twenty hours, and during the last eight hours the concoction had to be continuously stirred. Portable soup was also known in the eighteenth century as cake soup or veal glue; nowadays, we refer to the same substance as a bouillon cube. The trade name Oxo, which was inspired in 1900 by the word oxen, has also come to function as a generic name for this foodstuff.