Book Review: Umami by Laia Jufresa #weekendcooking

From its title, I thought Umami by Laia Jufresa would fit on a foodie fiction list, but as it turned out, it goes better on an Hispanic-Heritage Month reading list, and a “Quirky Neighborhoods” one.

Translated from the Spanish and written by an author heralded as one of the 20 most outstanding young writers in Mexico, Umami received good reviews when it came out in 2015. I don’t remember hearing about it at the time, though. In fact, an NPR reviewer, describes Umami as a “debut novel that I am afraid has been criminally under-read, a slim book about community and loss that somehow doesn’t feel as heavy as it could.”

The main characters in the story live together on a piece of property that has been broken down into different dwellings, each named after one of the taste spots on the “tongue map” that some of us learned about in school: Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, and the fifth one (belonging to the owner, who is obsessed with the history of it) Umami.

This New Yorker article, “You Think You Know Umami,” was published in 2015, which apparently was a food-trending year for umami.

The story could take place just about anywhere in Mexico, though, because all the local flavor comes from the characters in this accidental neighborhood – all of whom have come to be there by way of their lives taking an unexpected wrong turn. Each adult character is disguising an inner self torn up by grief and loss with a self-sufficient exterior. They’re keeping themselves separate from their too-close neighbors – barely managing – until 12-year-old Ana, in her efforts to understand the adults in her own family and in her community, breaks down some of their self-protective barriers.

Umami is quirky without being cutesy, along the lines of A Man Called Ove. The story is told in different voices by a character from each of the residences and with different time perspectives. It would make a good Reading Group Choice!

The two main story threads have to do with food, making it possible for this review to do double duty as a Weekend Cooking post!

The first one brings Ana (who lives in Salty) together with the owner-resident of Umami, Alf, for the purpose of creating a milpa –a method of planting that originated in Mexico combining corn, beans, squash, and peppers. Ana has proposed this plan to her parents so she can stay home from summer camp and she is relying on her landlord’s food agricultural background and expertise for guidance.

A childless academic whose wife recently died, Alf’s lifelong field of study was the history of milpas. Retired and at loose ends without his strong-willed wife, Alf tries not to let on to Ana that milpas no longer matter much to him.

Learn more about the history of milpas.

The second thread is the science of taste and the debunked “tongue map” that many of us were taught in school. From Alf, who has traded his obsession with milpas for science of taste, specifically umami, readers learn a lot about this hard-to-describe sensation.

The term “umami”was coined by a Japanese chemist in 1908, but didn’t become widely used in English until about 40 years ago.

The word “umami” comes from the Japanese word for “deliciousness”, used to define the particular taste on the tongue of certain foods that can’t be described by the terms sweet, sour, salty, or bitter.

Now umami even has its own Web site!

Visit the Umami Information Center.

Happy Weekend Cooking!

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