the West, umami is still a rather exotic concept. It is actually a comparatively recent term even in Japan, though the taste has been known for centuries. It comes from a popular fish stock called dashi, which is made from seaweed and dried fish scales, and when added to other foods makes them even more delicious and imparts an ineffable but distinctive flavor. In the early twentieth century, a Tokyo chemist named Kikunae Ikeda determined to identify the source of the flavor and to try to synthesize it. In 1909, he published a brief paper in a Tokyo journal, identifying the source of the
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