Thinkin' 'bout vanilla...

[beetiger]

I was listening to the radio in the car at noon or so yesterday. It seems that for some reason I remember what I hear in the ten minutes on the way to a lunchtime appointment than I do in my forty-five minute commute. In any case, there was some sort of a taste test/interview with some food personality or other. They were tasting ice creams, and he described one of them as "yuppie vanilla". I decided he probably meant Tahitian vanilla, which has a distinctive floral character and was kind of trendy for a while.

Now, of course, I'm thinking about vanilla. Vanilla's come to mean "bland" or "plain", but it's really been a very exotic spice for most of its history. Vanilla beans are actually seedpods of a certain kind of orchid , cured in the sun for several years. The major chemical component of vanilla, vanillin, is a white crystalline powder that can also be synthesized from the byproducts of the papermaking industry. This is the source of most cheap vanilla flavoring. But real vanilla has more than 250 other organic compounds in it. It's like the difference between a pure tone produced by a synthesizer and the sound of a woodwind instrument.

There's a worldwide vanilla shortage going on right now. The food industry's seen it coming, of course; it's a shortage due to problems in the crops the last few years, and the fact that the beans take three years to cure gives a certain amount of notice. But still, there's something kind of brazen in the recent launch of Vanilla Coke. Then again, Coke actually owns the whole of several subspecies of vanilla.

I've always gotten lots of really good vanilla extract for my personal use out of the labs of the companies for which I've worked. Vanilla extract mellows as it ages, becoming rounder and richer, the way good wines do. That means old samples are useless for product development, as they don't taste like what fresher extract will taste like when it arrives in a production facility. That makes it wonderful for cooking. Inspired by these thoughts, and by the fact that my husband was unwell and wanted soft food, I went ahead and made vanilla cornstarch pudding from scratch last night.


It's easy to make!
Dry mix ½ cup sugar with 6 tablespoons cornstarch and ¼ teaspoon salt. Put in a double boiler. Add 4 cups milk, stirring quickly to avoid lumping. Cook 8-12 minutes over the heat, stirring constantly, until it just begons to thicken. Cover and cook ten minutes more. Scramble two eggs, then add 1 cup of the hot custard to them, stirring so you get thick custard and not scrambled eggs. Add back to the pot, and cook two minutes more. Remove from heat. Stir in 4 tablespoons of really good vanilla extract, pour into bowls, and let cool.

Vanilla was once considered an almost-dangerous aphrodesiac, and modern sensory studies with adult men show that the scent of vanilla is still effective in causing arousal. Vanilla, in terms of sex, has come to mean non-fetish sex. It's overall used as a mildly derogatory term, implying blandness, lack of passion, inability to do something more interesting. Missionary position stare at the ceiling and think of England.

I've done my share of fetish play, certainly. But it's still sometimes just the right thing to have some quiet face-to-face lovemaking with someone about whom you care deeply. And sometimes, it's just the right thing to sit down and eat a big bowl of plain vanilla ice cream. Classic.

Opinions of what is standard, boring, or safe change. It wasn't all that long ago that oral sex was considered exotic, advanced play. Now teenagers are doing it to save their technical virginity. I wonder what pieces of the current fringe will make their way into mainstream culture to become classics. I wonder, once they get there, if we'll still want them anymore.

Comments

Cassis

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

Cassis is another name for blackcurrant, and also for the liqueur made from them. But in the case of a cola ingredient, they'll be using a oil or alcohol extract.