bouillon

Bouillon comes from the Old French boillir, meaning to boil, itself from Latin bullire. The noun bouillon, first attested in French in the 17th century, referred to the liquid produced by boiling meat or bones in water. Antoine Careme and later Auguste Escoffier codified bouillon as the foundational element of French haute cuisine in the 18th and 19th centuries, distinguishing it from consomme (clarified bouillon) and fond (stock used as a base).

The industrialization of bouillon began in 1847 when Justus von Liebig, a German chemist, developed a method for concentrating meat extract into a shelf-stable paste. His Extractum Carnis, later marketed as Liebig's Extract of Meat, was produced in Fray Bentos, Uruguay, using cattle from the South American pampas. The Maggi company followed in 1886 with bouillon cubes, and the Knorr company entered the market shortly after. The French culinary word had become a global industrial product.

In West Africa, the bouillon cube transformed local cooking. Maggi cubes arrived with French colonial trade in the early 20th century and became so embedded in Senegalese, Malian, and Ivorian cuisine that the word bouillon (or Maggi) is now inseparable from daily cooking. A 2019 study found that 98 percent of Senegalese households use bouillon cubes daily. The word crossed from French fine dining to African home cooking in less than a century.

English borrowed bouillon directly from French, retaining the French pronunciation and spelling. It appears on restaurant menus, in recipe books, and on the packaging of every supermarket stock cube. The word carries its French culinary prestige even when the product is a foil-wrapped cube manufactured in a factory.