EXCERPTS FROM THE FIFTH TASTE: COOKING WITH UMAMI
 

From the "Foreword" by Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything, and The Best Recipes in the World

    By explaining umami - the seemingly mysterious, often misunderstood, and completely essential and wonderful "fifth taste" - to American home cooks, and by bringing it to our attention, David Kasabian and Anna Kasabian are doing something that should've been done a long time ago. And by combining their own recipes with those of some of the best- and best-known food writers and chefs in the country, they're taking what would be a fascinating intellectual exploration and adding to it a great service, a collection of recipes, each of which is bound to explode with flavor...

From the "Introduction"

    In one sense, this book is something short of 3,000 years late. Records show that it was about that long ago that people in the Mediterranean began consciously adding umami to their food in the form of fermented fish sauce. This practice originated with the Greeks and was borrowed by the Romans who variously called the condiment garum and liquamen. Of course they did not know it was umami, but they did know that for some reason they apparently didn’t ponder it made just about everything they ate taste richer, meatier, more savory and satisfying. In a cookbook written by Marcus Apicius in second century B.C., nearly every recipe calls for at least a splash of two of the stuff, sometimes a good deal more. Vast fortunes were made and grand cities built because of garum.

    The first people who did ponder umami lived 1200 years ago in what is now modern Japan. Here lighter fare of vegetables and fish made palates more sensitive to the presence of this subtle but satisfying taste. They too were unaware of exactly what gave rise to the umami taste they loved, but prodigious consumption of dashi broth, seafood, pickled vegetables, and later shoyu soy sauce – all rich in umami taste – attests to their grasp of umami’s power to please...

From "Presenting a Taste You Already Know Well: Umami"

    In just the past few years, the conscious use of umami in cooking has become a powerful new culinary force in America. Thousands of chefs and serious cooks have embraced it as an easy, healthy and dramatic way to make food taste better by emphasizing umami’s rich, meaty, savory qualities.

    Along the way, some people have labeled umami a new taste, but it is clearly not new. No more than sweet, sour, salty and bitter – the other four basic tastes – are new. Umami has always been there, we have always enjoyed it, we have even craved it, ever since humankind started to eat. Yet we, as Westerners anyway, just didn’t know what it was – let alone what to call it – until recently. Turns out that umami taste is one reason we adore tomatoes, corn, cheese, mushrooms, oysters, aged beef and many other foods spanning cuisines of every culture on earth. These are all foods rich in umami taste. But, as much as umami might take credit for the enjoyment of a particular food, it is just one of many reasons we take pleasure in it. The others include the balance among the other four tastes, the food’s aroma, mouth feel and appearance, and even the sound it makes when you eat it. We’ll investigate these in more detail later...