Vanilla, and Other Essences

According to Harold McGee, true vanilla comes from the pod fruit of a South American orchid - the so-called bean. Predictably, there are several different varieties of vanilla bean, and different vanilla producing areas produce beans with different flavours. In that regard, vanilla is like coffee, or grapes.

The characteristic aroma of vanilla comes from vanillin; the smell of pure vanillin is sufficient to suggest vanilla. Which is why, on your supermarket shelves you'll find the following products in the cookery needs or spices section:

• whole vanilla beans, packaged singly in small plastic bags;


• vanilla extract - a thick brown syrup in small, expensive, bottles;


• natural vanilla essence - more dilute than the extract, and therefore less expensive;


• imitation or artificial vanilla essence - a mixture of brown food colouring (for example caramelized sugar) and vanillin in water and alcohol;


• vanillin sugar - a mixture of sugar and vanillin.

McGee notes that the demand for vanilla flavouring far outstrips the available vanilla bean crop, so most of the vanilla flavouring that is consumed is synthetic vanillin.

How you get the vanilla flavour into your prize-winning sponge cakes is, literally, a matter of taste. In my own cooking I use the extract - pricey but worth it for the more vanilla than vanilla essence flavour you get in the end product. But that's just me - you might be happy with the imitation stuff, or the vanillin sugar. After all, it's vanillin that gives vanilla its characteristic aroma and taste and on that basis, we could argue that, essentially, vanilla is the phenolic compound vanillin.

Forget that we - I wouldn't argue any such thing. Vanillin is what you have left when you take away all the other compounds that contribute to the taste of vanilla bean. Natural vanilla essence is a solution of some, but not necessarily all, the flavouring compounds in the vanilla bean in water and alcohol. My preferred vanilla flavouring, the extract, has maybe a few more of those compounds but again, not all of them. To get the lot - to get the fullest flavour - you need the bean. Beyond my budget most of the time, alas.

You can, nonetheless, argue the diametric opposite of everything I've just written, and insist that what actually matters about vanilla - or any other essence you care to extract - is not to get the fullest flavour, but the purest flavour - that is, its dominant flavour of vanillin. If you're that sort of person, I wouldn't want you sitting across the table while I was tucking into a creme brulee - the conversation would be unbearable:

"What's that?"

"Creme brulee?"

"What are those dark bits?"

"Vanilla bean. Want to try a little?"

"Oh, yuck! What's wrong with a plain simple vanilla custard? Why do they have to spoil it with all this self-indulgent over-flavouring?"

There are worse possibilities, depending on how dogmatic you are about the purity of flavours. Vanillin is often found in wines and spirits that have been treated in wood and the presence of vanilla overtones in these wines - particularly dessert wines - is noted and often approved by wine buffs. But is it proper for wine to taste, even a little, like vanilla? Surely not, if foods are to remain true to their proper essences - wine shall taste only of Wine, while vanilla reverts to its proper place as a flavouring for ice-cream. Not a lesser flavour - an equal but different flavour to accompany and complement the stronger ones - like chocolate.

On second thoughts, maybe not chocolate - its sensuality is beyond redemption.

Starry, starry, sleepless night

Too Lazy to Cross-Post...

...this piece on Voltaire at Larvatus Prodeo.

Slavery and Double Effect

Wednesday, 20 November 2002

I've had some correspondence on the Lies, Damned Lies and Doubly Damned Lies item I posted a couple of days ago and I've been prompted to rethink my position. After dragging out a couple of texts from my philosophy studies I think I've got a handle on the moral difference between slavers and the operators of the Nazi death camps. The key is the principle of double effect.

For those who are unfamiliar with this principle, a simple illustration will help. Suppose you are trying to overpower a crazed gunman and that in the course of the struggle, his gun goes off, killing him. Clearly, you are not to blame for his death, as your intention was to protect others and his death was accidental. This should not be confused with the situation where you pull out your trusty .357 Magnum and pop off a few rounds in his general direction, accidentally killing a couple of pensioners who were too slow to duck. This is an instance of collateral damage and although it may exonerate you from blame for the accidental deaths of the pensioners, there are some hair-splitters who insist that this is contingent on at least one of your shots actually hitting the crazed gunman.

Unlike the death-camp operators, who plainly intended to kill their victims, then extract the economic benefit afterwards, the slave shippers and plantation owners were clearly seeking the economic benefit first, and the alleged suffering and occasional deaths of the enslaved were not intentional, but merely a by product of the perfectly justifiable (in economic terms) aim of minimising the operating cost of a business enterprise by obtaining the cheapest labour possible. So the principle of double effect clearly applies here and we can safely exonerate the slavers from the alleged immorality of slavery.

In fact we can go further: the development of the nascent sugar-planting and cotton industries and their expansion produced a great deal of economic benefit in other areas - such as the expansion of the Grand Banks cod fisheries (see Cod by Mark Kurlansky). In the long run, the African slave trade was beneficial to the slaves and their descendants as it introduced them to elements of Western European culture such as Christianity, the Enlightenment Rationalist Tradition and sexual coupling in the face-to-face boys on top mode. (Although the last of these may be accounted a mixed blessing: it was face-to-face sexual coupling which opened the way to the girls on top mode which subverted male copulatory dominance by relegating men to an inferior, passive role and opened the way to western feminism. It is no coincidence that the societies where feminism has made the fewest inroads are those in which the predominant form of sexual coupling is the older "doggy-doggy" style).