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Snack bars galore: the wonder of football food

A Thursday morning in July and tourists gather outside the birthplace of the Patron Saint of Football Snack Bars. There are seven such visitors in all – a family of four, a pair of bronzed pensioners and a lone lady in a floral bucket hat. She ponders a segment of paper, the family point at phone screens and bicker like starved hens, and the couple battle to open an umbrella as if calculating how to assemble an AK-47 rifle for the first time. It is gently thrilling to find these disciples of our game’s culture here, outside 29 Main Street, Roslin, in Midlothian. They too must have come to see where John Lawson Johnston, genius inventor of Bovril, was born.

Except, they don’t look very interested in the plaque that boasts his name. Then all seven drift away distractedly, and I realise they are looking for the chapel: Tom Hanks, The Da Vinci Code, Knights Templar and all that. Theirs is the wrong kind of holy grail.

Number 29 is a quietly handsome sandstone cottage with dormer windows protruding from its roof like frog eyes. That plaque – above and to the right of the front door, this house’s beauty spot – proclaims Johnston’s birth here, in 1839, and offers the simple epithet: “Founder of Bovril Beef Tea.”

The young Johnston apprenticed in his uncle’s butcher’s shop on Canongate in Edinburgh, while also studying chemistry and focusing on the science of food preservation. Continuing the family business into adulthood, in 1874 Johnston won a contract to supply rations of canned beef to the French army.

While visiting Canada to source supplies, he founded a tomato-canning firm that quickly began manufacturing an invention he had conceived: Johnston’s Fluid Beef. The entrepreneur sold it as a hot drink at Montreal ice

Read more on theguardian.com