When cooking I don’t always season with salt, especially when it comes to meat. Instead, I like to season using chicken stock cubes (Knorr is my preference). I add a pinch or two when cooking all meat sauces and gravies and also when making vegetable soups. Firstly, this is more forgiving than salt and, secondly, when finishing sauces you don’t have to reduce them so much to reach their desired flavour…

Marco Pierre White in Hell’s Kitchen, page 11.

Aside from its inherent saltiness, there’s little to criticise. Nothing unpleasant like most stock cubes, and because it’s vegetable in origin, it works happily with meat and fish dishes, too.

There are two types available, an Organic variation as well as the ordinary one. Strangely enough, the two recipes are very different. My choice? Difficult one this. I’m always going backwards and forwards – FWIW, I have the Organic one in my cupboard at the moment.

Since I cooked a Jamie Oliver recipe for baked fennel that suggested dry white vermouth as an alternative to white wine, I’ve kept a bottle for when I need only a small amount of white wine. It’s a great alternative that works in just about any recipe that doesn’t rely on the wine as the primary flavour.

I also keep a bottle of ruby port open for adding to gravies, sauces and casseroles. It’s not as direct a substitute for red wine as vermouth is for white wine – it’s sweet, so has a very different basic character – but think of how many times the word ‘port’ has got your mouth watering on a restaurant menu.

Port is bubbling away in a casserole as I write this.

Not only are vermouth and port longer-lived than wine, they’re also very much cheaper, so I feel much more like adding them to everyday cooking. Everybody wins!

Today sees the start of a series of posts about them.

What can’t you do without?