MY LIFE AS A FOODIE
5TH
TASTE
Let it be said that
life would be dull
without umami.
Umami, coined from Japanese and also known
as ’the fifth taste’, refers to a taste sensation that
is either meaty or savoury.
I
’m trying to recollect the first
time I heard of umami. My guess
is that it would have been as a
teenager through my younger
brother Franck, who by the age
of twelve was a huge Japano-phile
and would use any excuse to be able
to wax lyrical about how superior
Japanese culture was. If memory
serves, it all came to a head one day
when I was talking about the evils of
monosodium glutamate (MSG).
“You don’t know the first thing
about MSG,” my brother shot at me
with a condescending look. “Do you,
for example, know what umami is?”
“Do tell,” I replied; the sarcasm
thinly veiled from my voice.
“Umami is the fifth taste. You have
salt, sweet, sour and bitter and then
you have umami,” he elucidated,
knowingly. “The Japanese have
known about it for centuries”.
Franck then proceeded to launch
into a detailed explanation. He
informed me that civilisations across
the world have been enjoying umami
flavour for ages and that an early
example of this could be found
in garum, a fermented rotten fish
sauce that the ancient Romans were
absolutely bonkers about. Other
notable examples are the flavours
released by cooked meat (think
of a rich beefy broth), parmesan,
mushrooms, soy sauce and
everyone’s favourite love-to-hate
ingredient: marmite.
There is a great paper written by
one Jordan Sand called “A History
of MSG”. I suggest you Google it. In
brief, the paper recounts how the
term umami was invented in 1908
by a Japanese scientist called Ikeda
Kikunae, who isolated an ingredient
in sea kelp and went on to create
MSG as a result. In the decades that
followed, corporations