Five tastes, not four
For most of the twentieth century, textbooks said that the tongue could taste four things: sweet, sour, salty and bitter. In 1908 a Japanese chemist called Kikunae Ikeda was eating a bowl of broth made with seaweed and wondered why it tasted so savoury. He found the cause, a substance called glutamate, and named the taste umami, meaning roughly delicious taste. Scientists accepted umami as a fifth basic taste once taste receptors for it were found in the 2000s. It is the savoury depth in CHEESE, tomatoes, mushrooms and a good SOUP.
The famous tongue map, with sweet at the tip and bitter at the back, is wrong. It came from a misreading of a German study published in 1901. Every part of the tongue can taste every taste. Much of what we call flavour is actually smell, so food tastes of very little when you have a cold.
The curry house and the salad from Mexico
CURRY is not an Indian word for one dish. It probably comes from kari, a Tamil word for a sauce or relish, and British traders used it for almost any spiced dish with a sauce. Britain's first Indian restaurant, the Hindoostane Coffee House, was opened in London in 1810 by Sake Dean Mahomed, who had served in the army of the East India Company. It closed within two years, but there are now thousands of curry houses across the country.
SALAD comes from the Latin for salt, because the Romans dressed their leafy greens with salty sauces. The Caesar salad was invented not in Rome but in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1924, by an Italian-born restaurant owner called Caesar Cardini, who is said to have thrown it together from what was left in the kitchen on a busy holiday weekend.
Heat that crossed an ocean
Chillies come from the Americas, and until Portuguese and Spanish ships carried them across the world in the 1500s, nobody in India, Thailand, China or Korea had tasted one. The heat in Asian cooking before then came from black pepper, long pepper, ginger and mustard. The chilli was taken up so quickly that within a few generations it was part of dishes that now seem unthinkable without it; Korean kimchi only began to turn red with chilli powder in the 1700s.
Plenty of foods made the same journey. Rice, the main food of around half the people in the world, spread west from Asia, while potatoes, tomatoes, maize and chocolate travelled east from the Americas, and every cuisine on the planet was changed by the exchange.
What the grid holds
The rest of the grid is a day of eating: PANCAKES, WAFFLES, BACON and an OMELETTE for breakfast; a SANDWICH, a BURGER, TACOS or SUSHI at lunch; PIZZA, PASTA or NOODLES for dinner, with BREAD on the side; and a COOKIE, a DONUT, CHOCOLATE, POPCORN or a PRETZEL for later, washed down with COFFEE, LEMONADE or a SMOOTHIE. Each has its own page in this category, and our famous chefs page covers the cooks who made some of them famous.