It attracted criticism in the London Evening Standard on account of its location

It attracted criticism in the London Evening Standard on account of its location. Far from being in New Covent Garden, it is in a Willesden factoryscape of Orwellian grimness.Inside, too, it is Stygian in its gloom. It’s hellish with the noise of the blending machines; it’s wetter than the deck of a fishing boat awash in a sou’wester. The beef gravy, containing wine, has a rather assertive, bloody-minded flavour. The chicken is tasty but more neutral, and you can bend it this way and that very comfortably.

My children don’t like the beef, but they love the chicken.I went to see Mrs Jeremy at NCGSC’s London factory. There is another one – newer and more state-of-the art – in Peterborough; the one I visited is more state-of-the-ark. They initially produced two – beef and chicken – and Asda and Sainsbury’s have reported a good response. Caroline’s company will be producing a vegetable gravy soon.Those food journalists who have tried the chicken gravy have given it an emphatic thumbs-up, but a rather more hesitant one to the beef version This was borne out by my impromptu tastings at home. Then it had to be strained, and simmered down to the consistency of thick glue. I’d put the stock in ice-cube trays and freeze it, ready to add to the gravy.”Not a lot of people have the time or inclination to do that any more – but they’d still like a nice gravy to stir into the roast chicken or roast beef juices. Could Mrs Jeremy oblige? With the technology in place for soups, this was no great problem for NCGSC.

“I’d trek back from the butcher with a load of veal bones, roast them in the oven for an hour with chopped onions, carrots and celery, cover them with water and cook for three or four hours, skimming off the fat every 20 minutes. What are the options? You can stir in a bit of seasoning, gravy browning and thickening – the principle of Bisto (potato flour, salt, caramel colouring, herb flavours). Or you can beef it up with a hefty, savoury kick from a blend of hydrolysed meat or vegetable proteins and salt – the principle behind Oxo, Bovril, Marmite.As a third option, you can go the haute cuisine way and enrich your meat sauce/gravy with home-made stock “I used to do that,” says Mrs Jeremy. It was made from specially prepared stocks, and coloured deep brown with anything from onion skins to burnt sugar, or even coffee.Unfortunately, Caroline Jeremy explains, the late 20th-century roast is a sad little thing, yielding little in the way of cooking juices Never has there been such a need for a real boost. Before there were plates, each diner took a trencher of hard bread which became a “sop” for food and its juices – hence the word soup. So soup and gravy are siblings.In time, though, joints got smaller and gravy thinner. We know from Mrs Beeton that, in Victorian times, a copper kettle was kept on the hot- plate, containing an all-purpose gravy.

It was obvious, really.Gravy runs deep, does it not? The Bisto Kids and the Oxo Family are part of our national heritage, so fundamental is gravy to the national character France has many hundreds of sauces. We have just one, gravy (and mint sauce, if that is a sauce).The thickened meat stock we call gravy is a robustly English tradition, deriving from the delicious juices dripping from basted spit-roasts in Tudor times. The market is now worth pounds 25m a year, with NCGSC (of which Caroline is still a director) hanging on to a 51 per cent share.The idea of fresh soup was obvious, really It was the technology that didn’t come easily. But having cracked that problem, the innovative thinkers at NCGSC have been asking themselves “What next?” Well, gravy. CAROLINE Jeremy knows a thing or two about gravy. At home in South Africa, she recalls, it was the essential accompaniment to the Sunday joints which reminded her English mother of home.