Somewhere in the various shelves and drawers of books in this house we have a Chinese cookbook called, as I recall, Eight Immortal Flavors. It seems that in Chinese classical "gourmet" cooking it is considered de rigeur to include in the menu of a planned meal every one of the eight flavors, viz.:

1. Sweet
2. Sour
3. Bitter
4. Hot
5. Salty
........and.......

Who can name the other three? I'll give a little time for people to respond, and I'll post the other three tomorrow sometime. Hint: Two of them you'll probably recognize, though you might not have thought of them as flavors. The third, though a common word, you STILL will have a problem thinking what it might mean as a flavor, until I give examples.

Dave Oesterreich