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garum (fish sauce)
t has long been known to Western culinary experts that there are four ‘taste’ senses (sweet, sour, bitter, and salty) to tantalise the culinary questing palate. However, in 1909, one Dr. Kikunae Ikeda, a Japanese researcher, discovered that there was, irrefutably, a fifth taste our senses can detect. That extra taste was named ‘Umami’ (or the essence of deliciousness), which had its base in ‘Glutamate’ (yes as in mono-sodium glutamate, or MSG which is taken from ‘kombu’, or kelp, an edible seaweed). The research, being in Japanese, was marginalised until nearly one hundred years later (2002) when Western researchers began to take notice of the ‘Umami’ finding. Now, culinary experts speak freely about umami as if it had always been there, which of course it had, but unnamed. Umami is the central taste of the West’s latest, and simultaneously oldest, fad - fish sauce which, in its simplest form, is fish (such as anchovies) and salt (which extracts the liquid via osmosis), these are layered in wooden barrels to ferment from a couple months up to a few years and slowly pressed, making a salty, fishy liquid which is used as a condiment and/or in cooking, but sparsely because of the strength of its saltiness. Fish sauce, specifically the Thai ‘Squid’ brand fish sauce (established in 1944 by Mr. Tien Chan) has long been my go to condiment. It was not until recently (while I was looking at a sensory display in the Colchester Castle Museum, Colchester), that my curiosity was piqued about that enormously popular Roman condiment also called ‘fish sauce’. Was there a connection, and what happened to its
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