5 minutes reading time
2015 is apparently the year of MSG.
Not the MSG you are thinking about.
Earlier this year, MSG: The Messenger of God hit the theatres. Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, the self-styled spiritual leader in bedazzled shirts, starred in it, wrote it, co-directed it, co-produced it, and presumably found some way of saving the cosmos in it.
That is not the MSG I want.
I want the other one.
Monosodium glutamate.
India desperately needs MSG.
We already love umami. We just pretend we don't know what it is.
Dal has it. Fermented dosa batter has it. Dried fish in coastal villages has it by the bucketload. Tomatoes have it. Mushrooms have it. The entire business of roasting, fermenting, reducing, and charring things until they become savoury is just us chasing glutamate in the dark.
Then there is chilli.
This is the part that always cracks me up.
Chilli is not some ancient Vedic crop handed down from the heavens by an enthusiastic rishi. It came here from South America, brought over by the Portuguese only a few centuries ago. In the grand timeline of Indian culinary history, that is practically yesterday afternoon.
And yet we embraced it with zero hesitation.
Tamil food without dried red chillies or green chillies is impossible to imagine today. Sambar, rasam, kara chutney, podi, everything. We throw fistfuls of chilli into every kadai and then scream that this is our pure, unadulterated heritage.
Nobody complains that capsaicin is a foreign agent. Nobody boycotts chilli because Vasco da Gama had a hand in it.
Because it tasted good.
That is how food culture actually works. Someone brings a strange plant across an ocean. A hungry cook tosses it into a pot. It makes the meal tolerable. People keep doing it. Fast forward a couple of generations, and somebody's uncle is shouting on Facebook about ancient tradition.
So why the special hysteria reserved for MSG?
MSG is just a dry, shelf-stable way of adding glutamate, the exact compound that signals savoury depth to your tongue. It does not turn garbage into gold. If your cooking is shit, MSG will only give you shit that tastes intensely savoury.
But if you are living on cheap rice and watery sambar, why shouldn't you use a pinch of white powder that makes a dull dinner taste like actual food?
This matters when you are broke.
Fancy ingredients cost money. Good meat is expensive. Aged cheese is a luxury item. Mushrooms are priced like exotic imports. Making a slow-simmered bone broth requires hours of gas and ingredients you probably cannot afford when you are counting change for the bus.
MSG costs almost nothing.
Yet we have convinced ourselves that a cheap sachet of white crystals from the grocery shelf is more dangerous than whatever questionable rancid oil is bubbling away in a street-corner bajji stall.
"It is a chemical!"
Everything is chemicals, you clowns.
Salt is a chemical. Cane sugar is a chemical. Capsaicin is a chemical. That sacred country tomato rotting on your kitchen slab is a bag of complex organic chemicals. The glutamate molecule in a factory packet is chemically identical to the glutamate molecule in an overripe tomato. The receptor on your tongue does not give a single fuck about your grandmother's culinary purity tests.
Here is what I do in my own kitchen.
I buy regular table salt. Then I buy a pouch of MSG.
80% table salt (NaCl) and 20% MSG, by weight. Not by volume.
This distinction is crucial.
Table salt and MSG do not have the same crystal structure or bulk density. MSG crystals are elongated, lighter, and fluffier. If you try mixing them using a cup or a tablespoon, you have no idea what ratio you actually created.
Weight solves the problem cleanly:
80 grams table salt + 20 grams MSG.
Dump both into a clean, dry glass jar, shake it vigorously until it is thoroughly blended, and keep it right next to the stove.
That is it.
Now you have a salt shaker that works double duty. Every single time you salt a dish, you are automatically dosing in a baseline twenty percent of umami. You do not need to measure it out separately, and you do not need to second-guess yourself while cooking.
It is basically a poor man's flavour hack.
Which sounds crude until you remember that salt itself is humanity's oldest industrial flavour enhancer.
We took chilli from the Americas. We took tomatoes. We took potatoes. We took tea and coffee. India has never been particularly good at keeping foreign imports out of the kitchen once they prove their worth.
2015: the year of MSG. Just not the guy in the glittery vest.
Image Credit: Still life with a salt cellar and a lemon by Pieter Claesz via Wikimedia Commons