What goes in the bottle
People have been squinting at our label since the 1880s. This is the long version of the short list printed on it.
Two things, mostly
Kitchen Bouquet is caramel color and a concentrated vegetable base, seasoned and salted. The caramel does the browning. The vegetables do the seasoning. Everything else on the label is there in amounts under two percent.
The vegetable base reads like a soup cart: carrots, celery, cabbage, onion, parsley, turnips, parsnips. Simmered down together they stop tasting like any one of them and start tasting like the bottom of a good pot.
What it tastes like on its own
On a spoon, straight, it is dark, salty and faintly bitter, the way concentrated things usually are. That is not how it is meant to be met. Cut into a pot of gravy at a few drops per cup, the bitterness dissolves and what stays is color and a rounder, older sort of savor.
The dose does the deciding. A pot that tastes scorched got glugs instead of drops. Our arithmetic for that lives in the drop counter.
The recipe card
Jules L. Tournade worked out the formula in the 1880s, and the first bottles came out of the Palisade Manufacturing Company in West Hoboken, New Jersey. The bottle went to the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and came home with its reputation made.
The recipe itself is still a handwritten card from the Tournade kitchen. It has changed corporate hands a few times across 140 years, and the card is kept under lock to this day.
Questions the label answers
A few things people ask us that the ingredient list settles better than we could.
- The caramel color is made with sulfites, and the label says so plainly.
- There is no meat in the bottle. The base is vegetables, spices, salt and water.
- On diet questions of any kind, read the label on your own bottle. It is printed on every one, and it is the only answer we stand behind.
| First poured | the 1880s |
| First maker | Palisade Manufacturing Co., West Hoboken, New Jersey |
| Shown at | Paris Exhibition, 1889 |
| The browning | caramel color |
| The seasoning | carrots, celery, cabbage, onion, parsley, turnips, parsnips |
| Spices and salt | under two percent of the bottle |
That is the whole secret, minus the card we keep locked up. The rest is your pot.
