Happy Birthday Maillard Reaction, it just turned 100

French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard, the pioneer in food science to actually take reactions and applied scientific methods to collect data of the changes that take place while cooking food.

His 1912 paper took a first stab at explaining what happens when amino acids react with sugars at elevated temperatures, and in doing so, Maillard set the foundations of serious food science.

The link is pretty interesting, and anybody in food processing is or should be well aware, if not of him, at least of his work.

http://cen.acs.org/articles/90/i40/Maillard-Reaction-Turns-100.html

Forgive me for the cut and paste but this is an interesting excerpt on flavorings and smell of cooking food on the article:

"For example, Hofmann said, "it's primarily the amino acid that drives the odor quality, not the sugar." Glycine reactions produce beerlike odors, valine reactions produce characteristic rye-bread smells, and cysteine is the amino acid responsible for many meat and cracker scents, he said."