make the jelly "serve as bread and meate the better", and whether the addition of isinglass would make it stiffer. The jelly was variously described by Plat as a "Victual for Warr", "dry gelly carried to the sea", and a food for soldiers on the march. Plat envisaged using this jelly either as the base for soup, or "neat" as a concentrated food. Reconstitution as soup simply involved dissolving a piece of the jelly in hot water to make "good broath", and, because jelly and water alone would be rather bland, adding such flavourings as were available or to taste – sugar, salt, liquorice, aniseed, or other "convenient spice". Plat emphasised the utility of the jelly as field rations, for "a soldier may satisfie his hunger herwith, whilst hee is in his march". He recommended that a leg of beef or veal be boiled with every 6 or 8 neats' (cows') feet to produce a jelly which would more easily dissolve in the mouth. The existence of portable soups (called "bouillons en tablettes" in French) is also mentioned, in 1690, in Antoine Furetière's Dictionnaire universel, under the article Tablette: "". ("We have seen consommés reduced into tablets, or broth to carry in your pocket".) Mrs Dubois As a mass-produced product, portable soup is generally held to have been invented by Mrs Dubois, a London tavern keeper who, with William Cookworthy, won a contract to manufacture it for the Royal Navy in 1756. Mrs Dubois was described as "a person of good character and circumstances". She operated from a tavern, at the Golden Head, in Three Kings Court in Fleet Street. She may have been the widow of a French chef and tavern keeper; but, by 1757, she had a new husband, Edward Bennet, son of a Sheffield knife-grinder. The contract with the navy was alluded to in advertising material long after it had lapsed, Benjamin Piper, successor in the business announced he was "Successor to Messieurs Bennet and Dubois, The original Portable Soup-Makers to His majesty’s Royal Navy" and one Vigor, successor to Piper, used the same rubric on his flyers. The naval authorities hoped that portable soup would prevent scurvy among their crews. They therefore allotted a daily ration to each sailor beginning in the 1750s. Captain Cook was convinced of its efficacy and carried it on both his South Seas voyages. Lewis and Clark carried portable soup on