dashi

Japan; kombu (kelp) and katsuobushi (fermented bonito) combination codified during the Edo period

Remained almost exclusively Japanese until the 20th century, umami science (Ikeda, 1908) globalized the concept, now foundational to global fine dining

Ikeda crystallised glutamic acid out of kombu broth in February 1908, thirty grams from twelve kilos of kelp, and named the taste umami. He had the patent by July and Ajinomoto was on sale by May 1909. What happened sixty years later is worth stating precisely, because the usual telling gets it backwards. Robert Ho Man Kwok wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine in April 1968 describing his own symptoms after eating out, named salt, cooking wine and MSG as possible causes, and said plainly he had no scientific evidence. He did not invent Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. A speculative letter from one doctor was turned into a named condition by everyone who read it, and it held for fifty years while the same compound in parmesan and tomatoes went unremarked. When Geha and colleagues ran the controlled study in 2000, of thirty-seven people who reacted to MSG and not to placebo the first time, nineteen reacted again the second. The effect would not reproduce. The panic was never about chemistry, and it was not really about the letter either.