Le Goût Caché

Lyrics

The kitchen is quiet. 
Water finding its heat.
Four tastes I was given. Four walls to my world.
But in the steam from this simple pot...
a fifth presence.

My tongue holds a map they drew in school.
Tip for sugar, sides for salt and sour, the bitter root at the back.
A well-traveled country.
But there is another region, unnamed.
A warmth that spreads across the whole terrain, a mouth-filling echo that doesn't fade.

Until nineteen-oh-eight. Tokyo.
A chemist, Kikunae Ikeda, leaning over kombu broth.
He asks the right question.
He pulls a molecule from the water and gives the ghost a body.
Glutamate.
He calls it *umami*.
The delicious taste.
The hidden note that completes the chord.

I find its echo everywhere now.
In the hard parmesan you shave on our pasta, fine dust in the light.
The sun-warmed tomato, its sweetness cut with something deeper.
They say it was our first taste, in mother's milk.
A comfort we chase our whole lives without knowing its name.

And the strangest part, the part that feels like us...
the synergy.
The kelp from the sea, alone, is quiet.
The dried bonito, shaved like wood, another story.
But together in warm water...
they create a flavor eight times stronger.
Not a sum of parts.
A new thing, born of two old things meeting in the dark.

So I stir the dashi.
Watch the steam curl and vanish.
I taste the work of a man from 1908.
I taste the fifth wall of this room, always there.
Umami.
The deliciousness.
It lingers when you close your mouth.