A is for Anchovy

For cooks, and certainly – if not emphatically – for this cook, anchovies are of the essence. Few other ingredients arrive in the kitchen with such confrontational pungency, and yet manage to imbue so many dishes with transformational subtlety. The bacon of the sea (and how I wish I could claim this coinage as my own, or even remember whom to credit for it), the anchovy’s initial attack lies in its fierce and uncompromising saltiness, it’s true, but it packs a double punch: after that first hit of saline intensity comes richness and depth, that resounding, flavour-enhancing savouriness we have learned to call umami. Meat has it, Parmesan has it, as do – inter alia – mushrooms, tomatoes, Marmite or Vegemite. It’s a good word, but can be bandied about so excitably and so often, it begins to distract rather than elucidate. For that reason, I sometimes hesitate to use it, although I do gain a shy pleasure from saying it out loud: the reverberation it makes in your jaw as you utter the word agreeably echoes the deep rumbling of the taste it denotes. But for all that umami is indeed generally understood to be the fifth taste – after salty, sweet, bitter and sour – it is more than that alone; I think of it rather as oomph, another word that is deliciously satisfying to pronounce.