Chemist
Kikunae Ikeda
池田菊苗 · 1864–1936 · Meiji to Shōwa period
Kikunae Ikeda (池田菊苗) was a chemist who did something rare: he found a new basic taste. For centuries people spoke of four — sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Ikeda showed there was a fifth, and gave it the name we now use everywhere: umami.
The taste in the soup
Ikeda kept noticing that a simple broth made from kombu seaweed, a staple of the Japanese kitchen, had a deep, savoury richness that none of the four known tastes could explain. In 1908, working at Tokyo Imperial University, he studied the seaweed and tracked the flavour down to a single substance: glutamate, one of the building blocks of protein. He called the taste umami, from the Japanese word for "delicious," and argued it deserved a place beside the other four.
From lab to kitchen table
Ikeda didn't stop at the discovery. He worked out how to make the flavour as a seasoning you could sprinkle from a jar — monosodium glutamate, MSG — and helped start the company that sold it, which grew into the giant Ajinomoto. For a long time the wider world was slow to accept umami, but modern science has confirmed he was right: our tongues really do have receptors for it. The savoury depth in a good broth, a ripe tomato, or aged cheese all comes back to what Ikeda first named.
Portrait: Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons
