2.5 Too foody, not enough history; and rather american-centered. Missing some info I know is relevant. I like pop histories and microhistories but this wasn't quite for me. ( )

An interesting look at eight different flavors from a food history perspective. Each flavor has a chapter of its own and is arranged chronologically based on when it became ubiquitous in American kitchens and cuisine (with the last still being new and perhaps not quite as commonplace yet) : black pepper, vanilla, chili powder, curry powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and sriracha. Lohman also includes some recipes in each chapter, a few of which I'd like to try.

I found most interesting the discussions of cultural attitudes towards the flavors and their associated cuisines when they were still considered new to America. MSG, for instance, is much maligned to this day and is even blamed for "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome". Would it have earned its reputation if it was used in another country's cuisine instead? ( )

An enjoyable and informative read, examining the eight flavours of the title and the history of their journeys to ubiquity in the US. It finds an odd but not unpleasant balance in tone, sometimes scholarly, sometimes unexpectedly dipping into pop culture references and the vernacular. The stories themselves are an interesting mix of food science, social history and cookery.
Eight Flavors gets a bit of narrative punch by writing up champions of each flavour: like Edmond Albius, the young slave who discovered the method of hand-pollinating vanilla, or Sadie Thornhill, chili queen.
It's a little disappointing, as a reader from outside of the US, to lack the connection to any of the many local eateries and many of the culinary trends depicted. Some of these flavours have a very different history and resonance elsewhere. Can't blame the author for any of that though.
I've tried a few of the recipes here and had no spectacular misfires, although the entire 250g stick of butter in the Country Captain Chicken was probably, on reflection, a bit extravagant. ( )

This is a very intriguing book. The eight flavors are, in order of appearance, black pepper, vanilla, chili powder, curry powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and sriracha. Lohman's approach is to tell us nearly everything it is possible to know about each of these flavors and how they became such an important part of American (U.S.) cuisine.

Lohman includes the science of each flavor, its chemical make-up, and how it acts in and on our bodies. She describes the botany of the plants from which the spice or herb comes, where they grow natively and to where they have been transplanted, and the people responsible for causing them to come to the U.S. Often she describes the various manufacturing processes that get these flavors into our homes. We get the earliest recipes showing the use of the flavor in north America and some modern-day recipes as well. The parts I enjoyed the most are the history of the people from around the world who used each of the flavors in their cooking and then, through immigration or war or marriage, caused these amazing flavors to be part of what I eat everyday in my tiny town in the U.S.A. Thank you to Lohman for writing the book, to my daughter for gifting it to me, and to all the people of varying cultures who make up our melting pot of food. ( )

The easiest and often most enjoyable way to get to know a culture is through its food, and the makeup of American flavor covers not just the taste spectrum of spicy, sweet, and umami but also the history of immigration waves and economics.

[a:Sarah Lohman|15061387|Sarah Lohman|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] of the Four Pounds Flour blog noticed in old cookbooks there were certain flavor profiles popping up, such as rose water as a baked goods sweetener rather than vanilla because vanilla was prohibitively expensive. She made a timeline of recipes through history and plotted them with Google Ngrams to see word frequency use between 1796 and 2000. These eight flavors were the noticeable peaks (chocolate and coffee were also popular, but they're extensively covered elsewhere), and are organized chronologically by when they appeared in American kitchens.

I was unsurprised to find that some flavors, such as black pepper and vanilla, became common after entrepreneurs and botanists figured out ways to make them more widely available and to actually cultivate respectively. Others, like chili and curry powders, come from the desire for a premixed pack, easy to reach without putting in the effort of roasting and mixing spices anew for each use.

Soy sauce and garlic were both interesting to me because they became widely available due to immigrant groups (Chinese and Italians) but were deemed too "ethnic" until a more "respectable" culture's food became #goals (Japanese and French cuisine). This bias is still around- think about how much people are willing to spend at an upscale sushi place, then try to remember how much you paid at your last dim sum visit.

My absolute favorite parts (which I also noted on Twitter) were when Lohman pointed out that compounds are compounds- regardless of source, vanillin will have the same structure and its atoms won't remember if they were derived from a vanilla vine or processed from leftover lignin from wood. Monosodium glutamate is its own flavor profile and yes, if you intake too much salt you will feel terrible, but the amounts of MSG in food are not the horrifically high concentrations used in early misleading studies of "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome". As someone with a genetics background who lives in the PNW, I am wary whenever some group touts their "natural" foods, as if natural can be quantified and measured somehow when really it's just emotion.

If a heftier read is desired, there's a very comprehensive notes for all sources and a selected bibliography for specific works in the back. ( )