What I Learned From Vanilla About Faking It
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Vanilla isn’t basic. It’s rare, slow, and hard to create. A story of scent, struggle, and what writers can learn from the world’s most faked flavor. Welcome to What I Learned From… “I am not plain, or average or - God forbid - vanilla. I am peanut butter rocky road with multicolored sprinkles, hot fudge and a cherry on top.” ― Wendy Mass, Every Soul a Star What I Learned From …We use “vanilla” when something is kinda plain. It’s so basic! But real vanilla—the kind that takes years to grow and months to cure—is anything but boring. I didn’t know this full history the first time I drank champurrado in Oaxaca. It was early, the morning sun still tangled in the curtains inside my Airbnb. My host had invited me to their Sunday family feast, the blanca señorita living behind the main house for the past six months. Though I attempted to keep up with the conversation using the twice-weekly Mexican-Spanish lessons I’d been paying for, it quickly turned into an opportunity for me to sit quietly and bask in the tastes and aromas each new course brought. For dessert, a simple mug of hot milky liquid, thickened with maize and dark chocolate, richer and more fragrant than anything I’d ever tasted. Chocolate is what you notice first. But the underlying scraped vanilla pod (something not found in many modern recipes, which I only knew about because my host lovingly scrawled her family recipe in my journal) is what made the difference. I’ve tried to recreate it a half-dozen times since, but I’ve never quite nailed the flavor. Maybe it was more about the memory? Or maybe it was something simpler: I didn’t have the real stuff. Vanilla is the only edible fruit of the orchid family, and it grows in a narrow band around the equator, only 20° to the north and south. It’s native to Mesoamerica, where the Totonac people were the first to cultivate it. They used vanilla to flavor cacao, a combination the Aztecs would later adopt and morph into xocolatl, the bitter, rich chocolate drink favored by kings. That’s the lineage of that mug I held in Oaxaca. Europeans loved vanilla, of course. They tried transplanting it wherever tropical climates allowed, but no matter how carefully they cultivated the vines, the plants never bore fruit. They didn’t understand why until they realized something was missing: the Melipona bee, a tiny insect found only in parts of Mexico. Without this bee and its long, tiny snout, there was no pollination, and thus no vanilla beans. That might have been the end of vanilla’s global ambitions if not for Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy on the French-occupied African island of Réunion. In 1841, Edmond discovered that with a delicate prodding with a stick and the press of a finger, you could hand-pollinate the flower. A child’s ingenuity, exploited for profit, with his name is buried in footnotes while plantations grew rich. His method spread quickly to Madagascar and beyond. Within decades, these new plantations overtook Mexico as the primary producers of vanilla. Still, the work didn’t get easier. Vanilla vines take years to mature. The flowers must be pollinated by hand during a brief window each day. The pods take months to develop and even longer to cure. They have to be boiled, dried, sweated, and rested until they shrink to a fraction of their original size. Even then, only about two percent of the cured vanilla beans yield actual flavor. No wonder the world got impatient! So scientists in the 19th century learned to synthesize vanillin, the compound responsible for vanilla’s aroma. They could make it from clove oil, pine bark, rice bran, or petrochemicals. At one point, some artificial flavorings even came from castoreum, a secretion from the castor sacs of beavers. Not their butts exactly, technically it’s a gland near their butt. Semantics won’t save you here. Today, ninety-nine percent of the vanilla flavor you encounter comes from synthetic vanillin. It’s cheaper, faster, and claims to be more consistent. You’ll find it in your ice cream, your candles, probably your shampoo. (Check the label! I’ll wait.) Without having to worry about bees or blossoms you just make it, bottle it, and ship it. But something’s lost in the shortcut. Real vanilla is spicy, woody, floral, smoky, sweet. It carries the imprint of its place; Mexican vanilla tastes different from Bourbon vanilla, which tastes different from Indonesian vanilla, which tastes different still from the whisper of orchid in a chocolate drink I’ll probably never recreate. That’s the thing about the real stuff: It’s alive. The more we try to mass-produce things like flavors, stories, or writing, the more we risk forgetting that. It’s easy to default to consistency and pick a well-worn path that yields something close enough. But real writing, like real vanilla, isn’t meant to be copy-pasted. It takes time. It changes with the weather. It needs your attention, your care, maybe even your finger pressed gently against the flower’s lip while it whispers something only you can hear. The world is circling back toward the real thing, our tongues craving more than “good enough” vanillin, and demand for true vanilla is rising again. It is still rare and definitely more expensive by weight than silver and sometimes gold. The growers who kept tending it have built something that can’t be faked. And it absolutely isn’t coming from castor sacs, cause no one wants their legacy flavored with beaver butt goo. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “I am okay with the imperfection of my own story. We are alive thanks to our imperfect stories and we need to be okay with that. Straight lines have never led the way to colourful pictures. I am okay with all that I feel, with all the pieces of me; and so should you. Every part of my story has the potential to connect with another soul out there, and so does yours.” ― C. JoyBell C. Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. Describe something you once thought was “basic”...only to realize later it was anything but. What changed your mind? Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Redolent [RED-uh-lehnt] (adj.) From Latin redolēre ("to emit a scent"), built from *re-* (“back or again”) + olēre ("to smell".) Originally used to describe air thick with scent: bread baking, smoke clinging, fields in bloom. Over time, it came to mean more than aroma. A word, a place, or even a story could be redolent of something else. A 16th-century poet might write of a garden redolent with crushed thyme and regret; today, it’s the ghost of your grandmother’s perfume clinging to a scarf you can’t bear to wash. Sorta synonyms: aromatic, reminiscent, lingering Use it for: Writing that carries a weight you can’t quite name, whether it’s the woodsmoke of a campfire story or the synthetic strawberry lip gloss of a 90s flashback. Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. The Baldwin Library Ever wondered what 1890s kids were reading? This collection of weird, wonderful picture books might just spark your next great idea. (Bonus: See how many ‘moral lessons’ involve turnips.) The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. Look, every one of our paths is gonna look different. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa |