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On your tongue, the glutamate molecule would sit right in the pink part. Image by Flickr user Robyn Gallagher

It’s called the “fifth taste,” and it’s loved, feared, and innocently sprinkled on food the world over, even though many people believe it’s a peculiarity of Asian food. I’m talking about umami, the savory essence of seaweed, dried fish, mushrooms, yeast, meat, cheese, tomatoes, and many other tastes.

And yet, ubiquitous as it is, it took until the early twentieth century for a Japanese chemist to isolate umami and recognize it as the fifth fundamental human taste—joining the select company of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. In an endearing bit of science history, the discoverer, Kikunae Ikeda, named the substance umami—Japanese for “yummy.”

You may know the flavor better as monosodium glutamate (MSG), the infamous synthetic form of glutamate, the chemical largely responsible for umami taste. Glutamate is an amino acid that occurs as a building block in many proteins (it’s actually one of the most common neurotransmitters in the human body). But it only triggers the umami taste when it reaches the tongue in a free state, unbound to other molecules.

This week, scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have puzzled apart the way glutamate activates nerves on the tongue. The findings help explain why umami taste can be accentuated by the addition of either of two other compounds: inosinate (found in meat) or guanylate (found in mushrooms).

Scientists call what happens during umami tasting a “Venus flytrap” mechanism: Glutamate lands on your tongue and nestles into a glutamate-shaped depression on an umami receptor. Upon contact, the receptor—an enormous, folded protein—changes shape and grasps the glutamate. That shape change also activates the neuron that tells your brain you are tasting umami.

The scientists also learned that inosinate and guanylate can bind to a separate part of the umami receptor. Once bound, they tighten the receptor’s grip on glutamate, increasing its ability to “taste” glutamate by up to 15-fold before the receptor relaxes its grip. The finding explains, perhaps, why a good Japanese broth contains both glutamate-rich seaweed and inosinate-rich dried fish flakes.

MSG—and by extension, umami—has gotten a bad rap over reports of people getting headaches or tingling sensations in the head and neck after eating foods containing the additive. But the FDA has not been able to identify MSG as the cause of such symptoms (so-called “Chinese restaurant syndrome”).

Even more reassuring than the FDA’s pile of inconclusive medical studies are the legions of people who blithely eat glutamates every day, the world over, in the form of hydrolized soy protein and yeast extracts. As a properly raised half-English kid, I spread glutamates on my toast every time I enjoy some delicious Marmite. When I settle in to watch Doctor Who reruns, the savory-cheesy nutritional yeast I sprinkle on my popcorn is glutamate central.

And it’s not just niche foods. Ever wonder what compels you to eat an entire bag of Doritos all by yourself? They may not contain MSG, but they’re packed with five separate sources of glutamate.

Head over to Umami Mart for more examples of this great flavor. (Star UM-er Kayoko has been on an umami binge in Japan for several weeks now, and I’m getting to the point where I’m too envious to keep reading her posts.)

Latkes (potato pancakes) are a traditional Hanukkah food—and while I was growing up, the only “latke debate” that I was aware of was whether it was best to eat them with applesauce or sour cream. (The correct answer: Applesauce. I have supporting documentation…)

But years later, when I was living in Chicago, I became aware of another dispute that has engaged some of the greatest minds of our era: “The Latke-Hamantash Debate.”

It began in 1946, at the University of Chicago. According to anthropologist Ruth Fredman Cernea, who has edited a book on the topic, the debate was the product of a chance, street corner meeting in Hyde Park between Hillel Director Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky and two Jewish faculty members. Morale on campus was low. With few occasions for casual student-faculty get-togethers and high pressure for academic achievement, young Jewish students felt uncomfortable and lonely at the university, especially at Christmas time. (Even today, the University of Chicago, with its intimidating gothic buildings, is a bleak place, especially in winter. The students quip that the campus is “where fun comes to die.”) And Jewish professors often felt compelled to submerge their ethnic identity to gain wider acceptance.

The solution? A satirical debate between Jewish faculty members, attended by students, contesting the merits of two holiday foods: the Latke and the Hamantashen (triangular-shaped cookies traditionally eaten during Purim). As Cernea notes, “The event provided a rare opportunity for faculty to reveal their hidden Jewish souls and poke fun at the high seriousness of everyday academic life.”

The debate also owes its origins to the festive Purim tradition of mocking serious rabbinical studies. (See, for instance, the discussion of whether dinosaurs are kosher, mentioned at Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking blog.)

The rest, as they say, is history. The Latke-Hamantash Debate became an annual event at the University of Chicago, and soon spread to other campuses across the country. The participants have represented a “Who’s Who” of academia, including Robert Sibley, dean of the MIT School of Science, who noted that Google returns 380,000 hits on a search for “latke” and only 62,000 for “hamantashen.” (Sibley has also claimed that latkes, not hamantashen, are the dark matter thought to make up over 21 percent of the mass of the universe.). On the other hand, Robert Tafler Shapiro, when he was president of Princeton University, made the case for the hamantashen’s superiority by pointing out the epicurean significance of the “edible triangle” in light of the literary “Oedipal triangle.”

Other contributions to the great debate have included “Latke vs. Hamantash: A Feminist Critique,” by Judith Shapiro, “Jane Austen’s Love and Latkes,” by Stuart Tave, and “Paired Matter, Edible and Inedible,” by Leon Lederman.

So, after more than 60 years of rigorous academic debate, which is the superior holiday food? Nobody knows, and that’s largely the point. “There is no winning, only the symposium going on endlessly, like the study of the Torah,” said Ted Cohen, a professor of philosophy, who moderated the University of Chicago event in 1991. Or, as the famous Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt once said: “I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become more complicated.”

– guest post written by Smithsonian senior editor Mark Strauss

–The Washington Post mentions the inter-agency controversy brewing over whether the government should discourage moms and kids from eating certain types of fish. The FDA thinks the benefits of consuming brain-boosting omega 3 fatty acids may outweigh the risks of mercury contamination, but the EPA’s not so sure. I’m intrigued, so I plan to read up on this issue and post more about it soon. (As an aside, Grumbles is a pretty great last name for a source, isn’t it?)

–The Obama administration revealed its pick for the new Secretary of Agriculture: former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack. Sustainable food advocates like Michael Pollan weren’t thrilled, while many farm groups loved it. Everyone agrees on one thing: Vilsack will have a lot on his plate.

–A bizarre medical case is solved: In Britain, swallowing sandwiches and soda made this young woman faint. Doctors finally diagnosed her with a very rare condition called “swallowing syncope,” meaning that her swallowing reflex causes her heart to stop for several seconds at a time. Never heard of that one before!

Also, a few stories to spread holiday cheer and chuckles:

–Meditations on the culinary philosophy of Dwight K. Schrute (a character on The Office, my favorite TV show), which I stumbled across on a great blog called Cheap Healthy Good.

–If you missed my co-author Hugh’s fun post about Recipes from Rock Stars, check it out and suggest your own musically-inspired menu!

–Over at The Ethicurean, visions of what the biotech elves could be crafting in their workshops this season. (For the gullible among us, it’s important to note the byline on that post: Barry Foy, author of a book I’m looking forward to reading called “The Devil’s Food Dictionary: A Pioneering Culinary Reference Work Consisting Entirely of Lies.”)

–And speaking of satire…I hope…is this blurb on Chow.com for real? Burger King’s selling a Whopper-scented body spray?

The legendary H&H Bagels in New York City, Courtesy of Flickr user Laughing Squid

Do you remember the first time you tasted a bagel? I don’t. As a kid in the ’80s and ’90s, I chewed my way through thousands of those boiled-and-baked rings of bread dough. Fresh bagels from Bruegger’s (a national chain that started small in Burlington, Vermont, my home turf, in 1983), frozen bagels, mini-bagels…our family wasn’t terribly discriminating, I confess. We often bought bakery “day-olds” (foolish, since most connoisseurs will tell you a bagel goes stale within a few hours), and my dad still prefers microwaving to toasting—another form of bagel heresy. (According to him, 22 28 seconds is the perfect amount of time to warm up a large bagel in the microwave. That’s the closest I’ve ever seen him come to cooking.*)

Now a new book by Maria Balinska titled “The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread” has made me realize that I narrowly avoided a horrifying fate: If I’d been born a few years earlier, I might have suffered a bagel-less childhood (at least in rural Vermont).

Where was the world’s first bagel born? Balinska discounts the popular legend that it was invented in 1683 as a stirrup-shaped tribute to the Polish king Jan Sobieski, who saved the city of Vienna from Turkish conquest. Nice story, but bagels are mentioned in written records from Krakow as early as 1610, and a similar-looking Polish bread called obwarzanek dates back to 1394. Ring-shaped breads have a long history in other countries, too: Italy has taralli and ciambelle, and China has girde.

In the United States, bagels arrived with the Eastern European immigrants of the late 19th-century, but didn’t emerge from their mostly Jewish niche markets into the mainstream until the 1970s. That was the era when “ethnic food” became trendy, and it was also when an enterprising family named the Lenders began marketing their brand of frozen bagels—”the Jewish English muffin,” they called it—to the masses through witty television ads.

In 1984, Lender’s Bagels were selling so well that Kraft Foods bought the company, which was a delicious marketing opportunity (Kraft makes Philadelphia cream cheese, so the merger “was billed as ‘the wedding of the century,’” Balinska writes, complete with a mock ceremony between a tubby “bride” named Phyl and an eight-foot bagel named Len). By the mid-’90s, bagels were a multibillion-dollar industry in America. Despite our best efforts at low-carb diets, we’re still addicted (though our love for frozen bagels has, well, cooled).

Bagel loyalties can run deep and fierce. Balinska describes the horror with which some New Yorkers greeted the advent of frozen bagels: “How can that be a bagel? A doughnut dipped in cement and then frozen?”

A truly good bagel, wrote one critic, should be “a fairly small, dense, gray, cool and chewy delight that gave jaw muscles a Sunday morning workout,” not the pillowy monstrosities now preferred by “a public too lazy to chew.”

Personally, I’ve become a bit of a bagel snob, after spending a year in Manhattan for grad school and discovering the joys of fresh, chewy bagels. My favorite ones come from the legendary H&H Bagels bakery on the West Side, which I was thrilled to discover are also available from at least one DC deli counter. I still get nostalgic and cave in to those squishy grocery-store bagels from time to time, but they really only taste good as a canvas for cream cheese.

What’s your idea of a “real” bagel?

*”For the record, it’s 28 seconds,” my dad wrote to inform me after he spotted this post. Also, he takes issue with my comment that he never cooks — he claims he once created a casserole called the Sugar Pops Tuna Wiggle. I can only presume my brain has tried to block out that traumatic memory.

Fewer wines wind up in barrels than you might think. Image: Wikipedia

With the holidays in full swing, it’s time to get serious about wine — something I regard as recompense for spending ages indoors with people I love dearly but who live in inconvenient parts of the country and tend to have very enthusiastic dogs.

And yet I’m hopeless at it. My experience with wine involves tiptoeing through rack upon rack of confusingly organized bottles, praying that my bag doesn’t knock over anything behind me while I look for some ideal intersection of price, label artwork, and name unpronounceability.

I used to read the descriptions printed on little squares of paper and taped to the shelves. But after several years I realized that all wines score between 87 and 92, and that pretty much any flavor is desirable as long as it isn’t grape. The less edible-sounding, the better: Bring on the vanilla, earth, leather, oak, pepper, orange peel, menthol, musk, and—no, I’m not kidding—farm yard.

So imagine my surprise to learn that many of these flavors come not from the pressed grapes but from the barrels they were stored in before bottling. And that owing to the high price of barrels, many high-volume winemakers skip the barrel altogether, opting instead to dunk bags of oak chips into their stainless-steel vats.

What sounds at first like an unconscionable shortcut starts to make sense when you look at the numbers. A prized, 60-gallon French-oak barrel can run winemakers $1,000. Do the math: the American wine industry produced 3 billion liters, or 13 million barrels’ worth, this year. Worse, the best barrels are made from oaks more than a century old (according to Jancis Robinson), and lose much of their flavor after their first use.

Good oak barrels affect wine in a few crucial ways. They help moderate the tannins that make wine astringent, reduce the taste of grapes, and intensify the color. They let in oxygen, which helps stabilize the wine while it’s young (even though oxygen destroys wine once it’s bottled). And they impart many of those unexpected flavors you read about in tasting notes. Some (vanilla and coconut, for example) come straight from the oak. Caramelized flavors come from the inside surface of the barrel, which is burned or “toasted” during building. Still other flavors appear when molecules from the oak react with complex sugars from the grapes to produce new aromatic compounds.

Industrial-scale winemakers realized they could do much the same thing by suspending bits of oak in their wine as it ferments. It’s cheaper as well as faster. Instead of keeping wine in a barrel for a year while it develops, oak chips can infuse a wine with the same compounds in a matter of weeks. And presumably, winemakers can now tinker with their oak-chip concoctions to get the flavors they most want.

I understand the rationale, and yet now I have this disturbing mental image of my wine being invaded by those bags of potpourri that perfume the bathrooms of my excessively neat relatives. Is that how all of these $12 wines come to be bursting with vanilla and leather? Is my favorite bottle of red, at heart, any different from a Yankee Candle? I think I’m being cultured, but am I really drinking some overspiced, oenological version of instant ramen soup?

Note: This post was written with the aid of a lovely 2004 Côte du Rhône syrah-grenache. The E.U. only began allowing so-called “oak alternatives” in 2006, so presumably this one had actually spent some time in a barrel.