The invention of the first stock cube with added fat ...
Bernhard Zamek, who was in fact a railway engineer and, among other activities, supplied coal by truck around the streets of Düsseldorf, opened a café on Münsterstrasse in the late 1920s together with his wife Johanna.
After a while they had the idea of supplementing their coffee and pastries by serving broth with rolls. This broth was made fresh every evening. From that time onwards, Bernhard Zamek experimented on the ideal recipe for a stock cube.
From a pharmacy he sourced meat extract, spices and herbs, and mixed all of this with vegetable and animal fats. He tried again and again to find the right mixture, until one day he succeeded in creating a recipe that pleased his own critical palate.
The resulting paste was prepared in the evening, left overnight, placed in portions in soup bowls the next morning, and then hot water was added as required.
Word soon spread about the quality of this delicious broth with added fat, and demand for it increased. Bernhard Zamek then hit upon the idea of fitting razor blades into a kitchen roller at equal intervals and thus dividing the mass of paste, which he had spread over a metal oven tray, into cubes of equal size by moving the roller back and forth. In this way he produced cubes that were large enough to make half a litre of broth.
At first he sold these cubes fresh over the counter. The bathroom of his production premises was converted in order to make the cubes. Here large quantities of the paste that had been mixed could harden overnight. Bernhard Zamek got a carpenter of his acquaintance to make several wooden blocks in the size of the cubes that he had shaped. He used the wooden blocks to make pieces of silver foil of the right size, and wrapped cubes in the foil in order to go selling it around the streets for the first time.
When the demand for this, too, increased, he had a drum on wheels constructed so that he could transport the cubes and deliver them further afield.
The first complaint came in not long after he began to supply the stock cubes: “Even after boiling it for several hours, we haven’t succeeded in making a soup from the cube that we bought. It is as hard as it was at the start, and won’t dissolve …” The cause of the complaint was that one of the blocks of wood used to fold the silver foil had mistakenly been sold as a stock cube.
Today stock cubes made from a paste are still supplied by the company – but now they are made by high-performance machines.
To this day the company is owned by the Zamek family.
