A Question of Taste

Vanilla is a very odd thing. It’s a distinctive flavour, exclusively reserved for use in ice cream and candles. Why ice-cream? I remember, back in the ’70s, when there where only three flavours of ice-cream: vanilla, strawberry and chocolate. If you were posh, you could have Neapolitan, which was all three of them arranged in a block. Even then, vanilla wasn’t really regarded as a flavour. You might as well have said strawberry, chocolate and plain. Vanilla is the ready salted of the ice-cream world.

What intrigues me is how vanilla came to be added to ice-cream in the first place. Ice-cream is a milk-based product, first brought to Europe from China by Marco Polo in the 13th century. Vanilla is a pod-like plant from Madagascar. Who first thought, ‘I’ve got this delicate and incredibly expensive spice imported all the way from the New World – let’s stick it in the gelato and see what happens’.

Presumably, you have to try a lot of flavours to see what works, as well. They can’t have just started with vanilla and gone, right, perfect, we’re done. They must have tried all sorts of stuff: oregano, pepper, turmeric. Presumably, they won’t have stopped at vanilla either. Having discovered that a bean seems to add a nice flavour presumably they worked through other kinds of beans. Aduki? Haricot? Heinz?

So, me being me, I decided to research this. It turns out that vanilla was a particularly late addition to the ice cream pantheon. Apparently, chocolate ice cream came before vanilla. Vanilla was just an extra ingredient people added to the chocolate to ‘spice things up a bit’. Then someone decided to forget the cocoa beans and just use the vanilla. Think about it. This must have been the Heston Blumenthal of their day. They must have been saying ‘I’ve got this amazing new recipe for chocolate ice cream. I’ve only left out one ingredient.’

All that to get to a world where vanilla is seen as plain, boring, uninspired. Well, I’m here to tell you that if you stick a vanilla candle on its not like spraying the room with Febreze. Vanilla is rich, and exotic and is amazing because you tend to forget its there when it’s there, but if it wasn’t there you’d really miss it.

Now think about all the people in your life you should reclassify as vanilla.

Sometimes, it’s amazing what you think about when you’re eating an ice-cream.