—a love letter to umami
Chinese food has exactly five flavors.
That’s not just my opinion, it’s a formulation that appears in at least 2,500 years of Chinese food writing. The five flavors—sweet, salty, sour, spicy and bitter—are the essential, indivisible components of cuisine.
Actually that 2,500 years is just the point that the five flavors theory got written down in a form that we can see today. The search for elemental tastes was bouncing around in some form for another millennium before than that. Besides cuisine, “five flavors” also forms the basis of medicine and the physical sciences. It’s not just kitchen craft, it’s a complete philosophy of the physical world.
But what about umami, the so-called sixth taste?
Sometimes translated as “savory,” umami is elusive. We know it when it’s not there, like the difference between chicken stock and salt water, but unlike straightforward tastes like sweet or sour, umami is much harder to pin it down. Umami is so slippery that it wasn’t even definitively identified until the early 1900s, when Japanese chemist Ikeda Kikunae found a way to distill the flavor essence of fish. The result? None other than MSG.
The character xian 鮮, the one used for umami in modern Chinese, is itself fairly ancient, and over the centuries has accumulated all sorts of unrelated meanings from fresh to kind-natured. But at least a hundred fifty years before umami was formally isolated in a Japanese chemistry lab, Chinese food texts like the 18th-century classic Recipes from the Garden of Contentment1 were already using 鮮 to describe the taste of umami-rich eels, carp, snails, salted seafood, spring bamboo shoots, and rice wine. A slightly older book, the 14th-century Complete Knowledge for the Householder2 only uses that word with the more straightforward meaning of “fresh” (as opposed to salted or dried), which seems like a reasonably reliable indicator that umami—whatever it might have been called—gradually came to people’s attention some time between those two points.
With or without the name, umami is the specialty of China’s coastal cuisines. Styles further inland might tend to a dominant taste of salty, hot, or sweet, but those areas lucky enough to have access to the ocean have learned to use dried shellfish, the mother of all umami bombs.
Scallops, shrimp, and abalone, among others, could be sun-dried and reconstituted, or partially dried and made into a salty, fermented paste. Exactly like anchovies, the secret to using an ingredient like umami-rich shrimp paste is subtlety. Just the right amount brings a richness and depth that no other ingredient can match. The tiniest bit too much and the taste is something else altogther.
Case in point, this elegant dish of celery with shrimp oil, from Beijing’s Michelin-starred 止观小馆 restaurant.
Using a recipe from coastal Liaoning, the restaurant makes its own shrimp oil by slowly simmering roasted shrimp shells in vegetable oil. As it cooks, the oil darkens and becomes intensely fragrant.
Cooks cut the thin celery, fresh enough for the raw vegetable to taste sweet, into even pieces. These are dipped for an instant in hot water to bring out the color, and then cooled in ice water before being lightly coated with the shrimp oil and a dusting of golden crab roe.
Home cooks using shrimp oil might aim for a stronger taste, matching it with vinegar, garlic or soy sauce. Other regions might even add dried chilis. But the restaurant version was intentionally simple to highlight the ingredients.
Celery, crab roe, and shrimp oil. That was it. No vinegar, no chilis. Not even salt.
This simple dish was a glorious start to the meal, but it really only works as part of a Michelin chef’s menu, a setting where you can be assured that your diners are sufficiently focused on the food to appreciate a very subtle combination of tastes.
Thomas David DuBois 