Deliciousness, taste and umami

For hundreds of years conventional wisdom, at least in the West, held that there were four basic tastes - sweet, salty, sour and bitter - which acted rather like the primary colours, in that the flavour of all foodstuffs was created by a combination of these tastes. However, in 1908 in Japan, Professor Kikunae Ikeda identified what has become known as the fifth basic taste. He gave it the name ‘umami’, which, in Japanese, literally means ‘deliciousness’, though a more accurate translation into English would be ‘savouriness’.