I adore chocolate and eat it very day. Yet I increasingly appreciate the taste of vanilla. Real vanilla (not artificial vanillin) is fruity and spicy-sweet with a mild floral aroma. So how did this complex flavor earn the epithet “plain vanilla,” synonymous with bland, boring, unadventurous, in short, blah? It wasn’t always so. In the 18th century, when vanilla was scarce, it was an incitement to lust. The Marquis de Sade purportedly spiked desserts with vanilla and Spanish fly. A German physician claimed to have turned “no fewer than 342 impotent men into astonishing lovers.” But when vanillin was synthesized in 1874, making it cheap and readily available, it lost its cache as a luxury. Fortunately, vanilla is undergoing a high-end revival, much like coffee and chocolate. Beans are now imported not only from Madagascar (source of 80 percent of the world’s vanilla), but also Hawaii, Mexico, Peru, India, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and elsewhere. Each terroir brings its own distinctive flavor(s). Vanilla is once again classy. Might the same happen to trite literary metaphors, taken out of retirement like old clothes and paraded as vintage treasures? I nominate “sweet as honey,” given that the decline of the bee population has made honey scarce. What banal metaphors would you like to see revived?
There’s nothing “plain” about these fragrant vanilla beans
