There was only one thing that jarred for me in this prelapsarian world of cooking, and that was the use of monosodium glutamate, or MSG. Like most Westerners, I saw MSG as a nasty artificial additive, used only in junk food and trashy takeaways. In England, you never find MSG in a domestic kitchen, and it would be a public scandal if it was discovered in the store cupboard of a serious restaurant. Yet in China, every kitchen has its jar of MSG, tucked away amid the soy sauces and vinegars. Top chefs use it in their most acclaimed dishes, and it is treated as a normal seasoning at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, the nation’s top school for chefs. The Chinese even call this white powder wei jing, ‘the essence of taste’, and translate it into English as ‘gourmet powder’ (jing itself means not only ‘essence’, but also, among other things, ‘refined, perfect, meticulous, clever, skilled, energy, spirit and sperm’, which gives you some idea of what a wonderful word it is). There is no shame, in China, in using MSG.
Dunlop, Fuchsia. Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China (S.96). Ebury Publishing. Kindle-Version.