The Furtive Flavour

Alan Davidson’s monumental Oxford Companion to Food — 20 years in the writing — doesn’t mention it. And Davidson writes as authoritatively about the cooking of a capybara (care is needed to avoid a fishy taste) as he does about candlenuts. It even eluded the telescope of Harold McGee, the original molecular gastronomer, whose survey across the firmament of flavour On Food and Cooking has been the guiding star for Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal. And yet the topic of our attention here is a vital element of the repertoire of virtually every cuisine in the world — even ours. Certainly this morning’s bacon sarnie, and Marmite on toast, would not have been much good in its absence. Nor would tonight’s risotto al funghi porcini, last night’s Chinese takeout and tomorrow’s roast with all the trimmings. I am talking, of course, about umami.

Perhaps the reason why umami has escaped examination by so many is that it is just so hard to define. Flavours often are. I like chocolate, for example, but any attempt to describe its taste precisely would be an embarrassment. Smooth? Silky? Creamy? These words might say something about the texture, but we have to describe flavours and aromas in terms of other flavours and aromas.

Perhaps a look at the history will help. In 1908, one Kikunae Ikeda isolated monosodium glutamate in a Japanese university and, declaring it ‘ the fifth taste’, christened it umami, which apparently translates as simply meaning ‘delicious’. It’s a long way from knowing that MSG is a sodium salt of glutamic acid to experiencing umami on your taste buds, however, and the truth seems to be that what Ikeda had actually discovered was a kind of essence of umami, rather as the synthesiser of saccharine did with sweetness. MSG is not umami and umami is not MSG. Umami is no more easily defined than any of the other four tastes — and if you think describing chocolate is tough, try ‘sweet’, ‘salt’, ‘sour’ or ‘bitter’.