It hadn’t occurred to me that savouriness was an identifiable taste that savoury foods had in common. Professor Kikunae Ikeda was led to the discovery of glutamate, and the invention of monosodium glutamate, by the idea that foods that are not sweet, sour, bitter or salty actually share another taste: savouriness, or umami. He said:
There is a taste which is common to asparagus, tomatoes, cheese and meat but which is not one of the four well-known tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty
http://www.glutamate.org/media/glutamate.htm
This all happened a hundred years ago, so why did nobody tell me before? At a young age we are taught about sweet, sour, bitter and salty, but I don’t recall being told about umami. Anyway, it must have been quite a Eureka moment for the Professor, and the ensuing invention made East Asian food tastier. I find this story quaint and wonderful, which makes it all the more odd to hear the suspicion and derision directed at MSG without a shred of evidence for any harmful effects arising from eating it.
On the other hand, I’m not a fan of Chinese food, partly because it’s usually gloopy, every dish tastes the same and most of the ingredients are preserved. But are the gloopiness and ubiquitous taste caused by over-use of MSG?
Stu and I climbed Cruach Ardrain and its partner peak Beinn Tuliachean yesterday (Cruach Ardran, Beinn Tulachan). We decided on this mountain (although it has two Munros it seems natural, given its shape and structure, to class it as a single mountain) in the car on the way North from Stirling, partly for its proximity to the A82: Stu was worried about little roads, after that hairy drive down from the pass in the Ben Lawers reserve.
I was sceptical about such a southerly mountain. I had wanted something truly wild. In the event it was a tremendous day spent on and amongst surprisingly wild and craggy snow-clad mountains. We could have done with crampons at certain points, because there was a lot of very difficult compacted snow and solid ice underneath the softer stuff, but we managed in the end (9 hours in all – crampons may have saved us an hour). Between the two peaks there is a wide uneven bumpy ridge which had numerous slopes which we used for some excellent sliding. You feel instantly better, physically and psychologically, when you do something like that. After one of the fastest slides the first thing I thought, and said to Stuart, was “life is good.” The mountaineer types (wearing these things) weren’t going in for anything so childish and fun – surely we won’t become like that? But I guess it’s a practical thing: you might have to detach your crampons to have a slide.
I wasn’t too happy about the initial ascent, because I found it very hard and I became quite negative, but the bum-sliding and the views made everything worthwhile. And I was very satisfied after we found our own way down from the mountain without paths, so we could avoid retracing our steps. And because below the snowline it was a gradual descent, I prevented the onset of my perennial knee pain. The route came down off the ridge between the two peaks (more bum-sliding), skirted round the lower crags of Stob Glas (where we saw a huge herd of deer, some of them posing dramatically against the sky), then slowly crossed the contours down to the top of Glen Falloch at around 300m. I guess you could call it a new route. Weariness set in on the 3-4km walk along the glen. Fish supper at Callander – good quality.
‘Huge herd of deer’?