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PORTSIDE CULTURE

IN PRAISE OF MSG, THE UNFAIRLY MALIGNED KITCHEN MVP  
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Mari Uyehara
January 17, 2024
Food and Wine Magazine
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_ Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda isolated glutamic acid, naturally
present in seaweed, tomatoes, Parmesan cheese etc; he dubbed it the
5th taste: umami. His discovery, called MSG, was popular before
concern arose about food additives in the 60's. _

“I always joke and say it’s part of the Chinese trinity: salt,
sugar, MSG,” says Chef Calvin Eng., Egasit Mullakhut/Shutterstock

 

My father is an American cook in that quintessential sense of
boundlessness.

Although his parents, by way of Newark, New Jersey, are of Ukrainian
Jewish stock, his repertoire ricochets across the map, encompassing
golden brown veal cutlets with an anchovy-caper sauce, stir-fries of
beef and broccoli, and lattice-crusted apple pie perked up with ginger
juice. He is an entirely self-taught cook who developed his skills by
leafing through cookbooks and cutting recipes out of newspapers.

One of my favorites in our family dinner rotation was what we called
“pearl pork balls.” The name referred to the shaggy, pearlescent
coat of sticky rice that formed around each small meatball after they
were steamed until fluffy in bamboo baskets. He originally got the
recipe out of Mrs. Ma’s Chinese Cookbook by Nancy Chih Ma, published
in 1960. But over the years, he made it his own, swapping in ground
pork and leek for the original beef and chopped onion, excising the
mashed potato, opting for minced ginger instead of ginger juice, and
adding vinegar to the seasoning of soy sauce, sugar, and salt.

One ingredient that he did keep was one you rarely see in American
cookbooks these days: MSG, or monosodium glutamate. It was once a core
seasoning ingredient in recipes but has since fallen out of favor.

The arc of MSG’s rise and fall goes a little like this: Japanese
scientist Kikunae Ikeda was trying to figure out why his wife’s miso
soup tasted so good. He isolated glutamic acid, which is naturally
present in seaweed (used in miso soup), tomatoes, Parmesan cheese,
meat, and more, and dubbed it the fifth taste: savory, meaty umami. In
1909, Ikeda debuted Ajinomoto, a company that produced MSG, and the
flavor enhancer gained popularity in the U.S. before a fog of
skepticism about the safety of food additives arose in the 1960s.

In April 1968, The New England Journal of Medicine published a letter
from Chinese American doctor Robert Ho Man Kwok, in which he claimed
that he experienced a “strange syndrome” after eating at Chinese
restaurants. That was later misinterpreted into hard research on
MSG’s ill effects and spun up into a 1969 hearing of the Senate
Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, rebranding the
ingredient as controversial and unsafe. Chinese restaurant owners
began erecting “NO MSG” signs in restaurant windows to ward off
offensive questioning. (That the fabled effects of MSG were dubbed
“Chinese Restaurant Syndrome,” despite the ingredient’s origin
in Japan, fell squarely into the contemporary white American framework
of perceiving Chinese things as cheap, dirty, and dangerous and
Japanese ones as more expensive, sophisticated, and safe.)

But that was then.

For nearly 25 years now, the unfairly maligned MSG has been the
subject of a robust rehabilitation campaign from the country’s most
respected authorities on food. In the 1999 essay “Why Doesn’t
Everyone in China Have a Headache?” Vogue’s iconic food critic
Jeffrey Steingarten searingly and hilariously skewered bunk health
claims about the seasoning. His seminal myth-buster has since been
followed by countless defenses in esteemed publications: The New York
Times, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, and this magazine among
them. Even the poll analysis site FiveThirtyEight has weighed in on
the subject: “How MSG Got a Bad Rap: Flawed Science and
Xenophobia.”

Some of the world’s greatest chefs have also been MSG cheerleaders.
David Chang gave a TED-like talk on MSG and umami at The Mad
Symposium, a brainy chef convention, in Denmark in 2012. Heston
Blumenthal, of three-Michelin-star The Fat Duck outside London, has
called the fearmongering about MSG “the biggest old wives’
tale.”

Yet pure MSG has never recovered its place in the vast majority of
American pantries. Every year, Americans consume boatloads of
MSG-laced foods in the form of Doritos, Campbell’s Condensed Chicken
Noodle Soup, bouillon cubes, and much more. The average American
adult, according to the Food and Drug Administration, consumes
approximately 13 grams of glutamate each day from protein and an
additional 0.55 grams of added MSG, but most still won’t pick up a
bag of it to use in their home kitchen. That’s a fairly recent
phenomenon.

Once upon a time, MSG was a staple in the American cupboard. “Salt
That Tastes Like Meat” heralded a 1929 Atlantic City Sunday Press
article, explaining that the ingredient was common in Japanese cooking
and that Ajinomoto translated to “the element of taste.” Nineteen
years later, a 1948 wire-service article predicted “Monosodium to
Join Salt and Pepper.” Ajinomoto competitors like Ac’cent, Spice
Islands, and General Mills put their own MSG products on the market.
Subsequent articles claimed that its improvement of food was
“startling” and that it “made flavors sing.” It was supposed
to be “the third shaker.”

And for a time, it was. The earliest MSG recipe I could find was for
“California’s Favorite Chateaubriand,” published in 1931 in
American Cattle Producer by the American National Live Stock
Association. But things really seemed to get going in the late 1940s,
when newspapers began frequently featuring recipes — pork chop
casserole, pollo con tocino, baked stuffed zucchini — all calling
for a touch of MSG. As did cookbooks, including my personal favorite,
Myra Waldo’s 1958 1001 Ways to Please a Husband, which incorporated
MSG into scrambled shrimp. Recipe contests showcased plenty of winners
with MSG, like a 1971 recipe for pâté-stuffed chicken breasts from a
national chicken-cooking contest. It wasn’t just housewives who took
to the flavor booster; it was an ingredient worthy of presidents.
Dwight Eisenhower’s recipe for “old-fashioned” beef stew, now
immortalized in the Eisenhower Presidential Library, called for prime
round, carrots, onions, and MSG.

Then, the proliferation of misinformation about MSG began seeping into
the cooking vernacular, and it was dubbed “optional,”
“controversial,” or even unsafe to consume. The stigma has
persisted, and today, many Americans still remain stubbornly closed
off to MSG.

Calvin Eng, a 2022 F&W Best New Chef and coauthor of the forthcoming
cookbook Salt, Sugar + MSG, says his family was among those scared off
from using MSG. “It was taboo at home,” he says. Though a champion
of it now, he didn’t start cooking with MSG until he began working
in restaurants. “When I started working at Win Son, we ordered
100-pound barrels at a time,” he tells me. MSG has always featured
in savory preparations, adding a little oomph to burgers, ribs,
meatloaf, and stuffing. But now, chefs like Eng are figuring out
exciting new ways to use it.

At his restaurant Bonnie’s in Brooklyn, Eng and his team tuck MSG
into a wide range of dishes: meat and vegetables, of course, but also
dessert components, like salted caramel, and their wildly popular MSG
Martini — a better-calibrated dirty martini thought up by head
bartender Channing Centeno. “A lot of people always ask why we put
it on menus and so up front,” says Eng. “We’re proud to embrace
it, to de-stigmatize it.”

Once he discovered its umami superpowers, there was no going back. The
trick, he says, is not to use too much, which will impart a bitter
flavor. Another MSG booster, Johnny Spero of Bar Spero in Washington,
D.C., agrees, noting that the “smallest amount rounds out the
flavor.”

While nutrition fads have come and gone, my father, never one to pay
mind to flimsy authority, has kept on with his MSG-boosted Pearl
Balls. So, too, has a certain segment of the American public. MSG
recipes have persisted under the radar in newspapers and cookbooks,
albeit in a much lower proportion. Long after the fear campaign of the
late 1960s took hold, you could still find MSG in the pages of all
sorts of cookbooks: the 1975 New York Times Weekend Cookbook, the 1980
American Dietetic Association Family Cookbook, the 1993 Black Family
Reunion Cookbook, and the 2005 Food Network Favorites among them.

You could seek out recipes, like the ones in this magazine. Or you
could do what many American home cooks have done for almost a century
and try adding a pinch of the “magic ingredient,” as the
newspapers once called it, here and there—in salad dressings,
barbecue, roasts, pasta sauces, and more—and see what a flick of
umami can do for a dish. “I always joke and say it’s part of the
Chinese trinity: salt, sugar, MSG,” says Eng, who keeps a container
of the stuff by the stove, just like salt and pepper, to sprinkle in
as needed. Sometimes, MSG is the illusory solution to the
something-is-missing affliction of certain recipes; other times, it
rounds out and elevates the other flavors.

I will admit there is probably one health claim about MSG that is
undeniably true. Used properly and in proportion, it will make your
food taste so good, you will want to eat more.

* food additives
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* MSG
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