I got divorced in the past 3 months and my ex is an alcoholic. Not the literary type of alcoholic who is debonair and amusing but the kind of drunk who rarely has a job, gets sent to jail and lives in abandoned houses. Obviously I am not getting child support. But, he manages to get people to do things for him. One day I came home from work and found a bunch of canned and packaged foods in my kitchen. Apparently people at work and friends had given him a bunch of food so, he brought it over to my house. Some of it was fairly normal - green beans, canned pears, mushroom soup. But some of it was just weird like: packaged humus with no directions, no sugar - lime jello, broccoli soup mix (just add broccoli?).
Anyway, I just made the Chinese Style Egg Flower Soup Mix from Kikkoman. Add package to 2.5 cups of water and then add an well beaten egg. This had way too much salt. I poured it over some left over rice I had in the fridge and it was edible.
The soup has a strong Umami taste. According to Harald McGee in "On Food and Cooking", this taste was formally discovered in 1908 by a Japanese chemist. Until 2001 it was not known that humans had a specific taste receptor for umami. Like sweet, sour, salty and bitter, humans have specific taste receptors for umami. This soup does have MSG (the biggest provider of the umami taste in processed foods) but it also has dried cloud ear mushrooms which gives the umami taste and very nice chewy tooth feel.
Umami is Japanese and roughly translates to "delicious". It is funny that this fundamental taste which we all crave also has the sounds "mommy" in it.
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