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Vanilla: The Cultural History of the World's Favorite Flavor and Fragrance
A history of the world's favorite scent and flavor looks at the diverse impact of vanilla on the worlds of medicine, psychology, politics, and food, tracing the history of vanilla through the centuries and offering a host of intriguing insights, trivia, lore, and recipes. 20,000 first printing.
371 pages, Hardcover
First published November 4, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
October 20, 2017
I love the biography of things. I love vanilla. I love history. When they're combined? Not so much.
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October 28, 2024Meh.
Also if ever a book needed an index, it’s this one. It is larded with recipes but without an index you will never find them again.
Also if ever a book needed an index, it’s this one. It is larded with recipes but without an index you will never find them again.
February 19, 2018
While I enjoyed learning more about vanilla, this was a somewhat frustrating read. For one thing, I think this book is in dire need of a copyeditor. I found it rather disorganized and there were several sections that did not seem to follow from anything previously discussed. There were also portions containing a great deal of extraneous information. And there were multiple sentences that simply made no sense scattered throughout, and every time I came across one it drove me to distraction. This book also lacked an index, which made it almost impossible to refer to previously provided information when necessary. I had no idea how much I appreciated indices before this.
Including the recipes was a great idea, but it would have been even better if more of them had been linked more closely to the text. For example, during a discussion of Tahitian vanilla, the text said that since fresh fish is a dietary staple in Tahiti, almost everyone had a recipe for mahi-mahi in vanilla cream sauce. But the recipe that immediately followed this section was not for mahi-mahi in vanilla cream sauce but for papaya chicken, which was not previously discussed at all. The last chapter was devoted to a variety of vanilla recipes and was interesting because it showed some of the savory applications of vanilla (an aspect I did not think much of at all before).
And if you can get past its weaknesses, you can extract (pun intended) a great deal of information from this book, which is why it's getting a higher rating than I would otherwise give.
Including the recipes was a great idea, but it would have been even better if more of them had been linked more closely to the text. For example, during a discussion of Tahitian vanilla, the text said that since fresh fish is a dietary staple in Tahiti, almost everyone had a recipe for mahi-mahi in vanilla cream sauce. But the recipe that immediately followed this section was not for mahi-mahi in vanilla cream sauce but for papaya chicken, which was not previously discussed at all. The last chapter was devoted to a variety of vanilla recipes and was interesting because it showed some of the savory applications of vanilla (an aspect I did not think much of at all before).
And if you can get past its weaknesses, you can extract (pun intended) a great deal of information from this book, which is why it's getting a higher rating than I would otherwise give.
December 12, 2017
Mexican Immigrant Keeps Madagascar Afloat
There was an Australian movie back in the `70s called "Sunday Too Far Away" in which an alcoholic cook on a remote sheep station kept himself high with vanilla extract. That was the first time I knew it had such a high alcohol content. This book came out much later, otherwise I would have known that and thousands of other interesting facts about a humble (to most of us) product that originally grew in Mexico and Central America. No worries, mate, if you read this volume, you will never take vanilla for granted again. You will know that it is the only product that mankind obtains from an orchid, that it is the crop which takes longest to raise, treat, and process, that while it once reigned king in certain parts of coastal Mexico, it now is found from Madagascar to Tahiti, in India, Uganda, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and other tropical spots. The author describes life and times around Papantla, Vera Cruz, the Totonac Indians and the European immigrants that built their fortune on vanilla. While vanilla does not loom large in the legend of developed countries, for some, particularly Madagascar, vanilla is the primary export. She also covers a wealth of other things---spice and flavoring companies, those that made extract and artificial compounds---vanilla as medicine, vanilla as aphrodisiac, vanilla as an antidote to stress---organic vanilla and fair trade vanilla, problems of vanilla curing or preparing, the spread of vanilla from its original home, the fluctuating price of the product due to the vagaries of weather and economy. Yes, you will finish this book with far more knowledge than you started with. And I reckon that's a good thing. You may also get a lot of recipes which use vanilla. Some of them look quite delicious, for example candied winter squash with 2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract.
However. The style of VANILLA reminded me of the old Ladies' Home Journal, or maybe Gourmet magazine (now defunct). I constantly felt I was going to turn the page and find a "scratch and sniff". Not only stylistic matters troubled me. The editing is poor. The author obviously knew geography, but still a number of geographic mistakes crept in. Some statements, made because of a need to generalize when writing on such a wide topic, struck me as "weird history" or just incorrect. The author's English often runs off the rails...eg. "the most distinctly unique country in the world" (p.206) or "hospitable trade relations" (p.188) I could expand on this. Poor editing detracts from a reader's enjoyment and calls into question the accuracy of other material which one doesn't know about. It's a great subject, the recipes look great, but I think the book needed more work. Enthusiasm is commendable and I could give five stars for that, but three is plenty overall.
There was an Australian movie back in the `70s called "Sunday Too Far Away" in which an alcoholic cook on a remote sheep station kept himself high with vanilla extract. That was the first time I knew it had such a high alcohol content. This book came out much later, otherwise I would have known that and thousands of other interesting facts about a humble (to most of us) product that originally grew in Mexico and Central America. No worries, mate, if you read this volume, you will never take vanilla for granted again. You will know that it is the only product that mankind obtains from an orchid, that it is the crop which takes longest to raise, treat, and process, that while it once reigned king in certain parts of coastal Mexico, it now is found from Madagascar to Tahiti, in India, Uganda, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and other tropical spots. The author describes life and times around Papantla, Vera Cruz, the Totonac Indians and the European immigrants that built their fortune on vanilla. While vanilla does not loom large in the legend of developed countries, for some, particularly Madagascar, vanilla is the primary export. She also covers a wealth of other things---spice and flavoring companies, those that made extract and artificial compounds---vanilla as medicine, vanilla as aphrodisiac, vanilla as an antidote to stress---organic vanilla and fair trade vanilla, problems of vanilla curing or preparing, the spread of vanilla from its original home, the fluctuating price of the product due to the vagaries of weather and economy. Yes, you will finish this book with far more knowledge than you started with. And I reckon that's a good thing. You may also get a lot of recipes which use vanilla. Some of them look quite delicious, for example candied winter squash with 2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract.
However. The style of VANILLA reminded me of the old Ladies' Home Journal, or maybe Gourmet magazine (now defunct). I constantly felt I was going to turn the page and find a "scratch and sniff". Not only stylistic matters troubled me. The editing is poor. The author obviously knew geography, but still a number of geographic mistakes crept in. Some statements, made because of a need to generalize when writing on such a wide topic, struck me as "weird history" or just incorrect. The author's English often runs off the rails...eg. "the most distinctly unique country in the world" (p.206) or "hospitable trade relations" (p.188) I could expand on this. Poor editing detracts from a reader's enjoyment and calls into question the accuracy of other material which one doesn't know about. It's a great subject, the recipes look great, but I think the book needed more work. Enthusiasm is commendable and I could give five stars for that, but three is plenty overall.
September 6, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #Food History
When I read Patricia Rain’s Vanilla back in 2009, I thought I was just going to learn about ice cream’s best friend. What I actually got was a globe-spanning, centuries-deep tale of obsession, colonization, and botany so dramatic it could rival a Shakespearean subplot. Vanilla, as Rain proves, is anything but “plain.”
First, the basics: vanilla is the cured seed pod of an orchid. An orchid! That delicate, diva-like flower somehow gave us the backbone of custards, cakes, perfumes, and, yes, cheap supermarket candles. But the orchid is famously stubborn. For centuries, it grew only in Mexico, where it had been cultivated by the Totonacs long before the Spanish showed up. The Aztecs, in fact, blended it with cacao to make their royal chocolate drinks—a combination that still feels decadent today.
Here’s the kicker: when Europeans tried to grow vanilla elsewhere, the orchids bloomed but wouldn’t bear fruit. Why? Because they needed a specific bee—the Melipona bee of Mexico—for pollination. No bee, no bean. The whole world lusted after vanilla, but it was trapped in its homeland. Rain’s retelling of how this puzzle was cracked is one of the most satisfying aha-moments in food history: in 1841, a 12-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion Island, Edmond Albius, figured out how to hand-pollinate the orchid. That discovery blasted vanilla cultivation across the tropics—Madagascar, Tahiti, Indonesia—and made it one of the most lucrative flavor trades in the world.
But Rain doesn’t just give us the plant’s biography; she explores vanilla’s cultural afterlives. It becomes a perfume note in French luxury, a baking staple in American kitchens, a symbol of comfort, sweetness, and nostalgia. And yet, there’s irony: vanilla is one of the most labor-intensive crops in existence. Every single flower must still be pollinated by hand, and curing the pods takes months. No wonder natural vanilla is outrageously expensive, leading to its chemical doppelgänger—synthetic vanillin—dominating most of what we taste today.
Reading this book in 2009 left me shaken in the best way. Suddenly, vanilla ice cream didn’t taste “plain”—it tasted like colonial history, global trade, and the fingerprints of people in Madagascar who literally pollinate flowers one by one. Rain writes with both scholarship and passion (she’s called “The Vanilla Queen” for a reason), and her book made me realize that even the most ordinary-seeming flavor carries with it centuries of struggle, invention, and desire.
Since then, every time someone calls something “vanilla” as an insult, I kind of want to hand them this book and say, Read this, and then tell me vanilla is boring. Spoiler: you won’t.
When I read Patricia Rain’s Vanilla back in 2009, I thought I was just going to learn about ice cream’s best friend. What I actually got was a globe-spanning, centuries-deep tale of obsession, colonization, and botany so dramatic it could rival a Shakespearean subplot. Vanilla, as Rain proves, is anything but “plain.”
First, the basics: vanilla is the cured seed pod of an orchid. An orchid! That delicate, diva-like flower somehow gave us the backbone of custards, cakes, perfumes, and, yes, cheap supermarket candles. But the orchid is famously stubborn. For centuries, it grew only in Mexico, where it had been cultivated by the Totonacs long before the Spanish showed up. The Aztecs, in fact, blended it with cacao to make their royal chocolate drinks—a combination that still feels decadent today.
Here’s the kicker: when Europeans tried to grow vanilla elsewhere, the orchids bloomed but wouldn’t bear fruit. Why? Because they needed a specific bee—the Melipona bee of Mexico—for pollination. No bee, no bean. The whole world lusted after vanilla, but it was trapped in its homeland. Rain’s retelling of how this puzzle was cracked is one of the most satisfying aha-moments in food history: in 1841, a 12-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion Island, Edmond Albius, figured out how to hand-pollinate the orchid. That discovery blasted vanilla cultivation across the tropics—Madagascar, Tahiti, Indonesia—and made it one of the most lucrative flavor trades in the world.
But Rain doesn’t just give us the plant’s biography; she explores vanilla’s cultural afterlives. It becomes a perfume note in French luxury, a baking staple in American kitchens, a symbol of comfort, sweetness, and nostalgia. And yet, there’s irony: vanilla is one of the most labor-intensive crops in existence. Every single flower must still be pollinated by hand, and curing the pods takes months. No wonder natural vanilla is outrageously expensive, leading to its chemical doppelgänger—synthetic vanillin—dominating most of what we taste today.
Reading this book in 2009 left me shaken in the best way. Suddenly, vanilla ice cream didn’t taste “plain”—it tasted like colonial history, global trade, and the fingerprints of people in Madagascar who literally pollinate flowers one by one. Rain writes with both scholarship and passion (she’s called “The Vanilla Queen” for a reason), and her book made me realize that even the most ordinary-seeming flavor carries with it centuries of struggle, invention, and desire.
Since then, every time someone calls something “vanilla” as an insult, I kind of want to hand them this book and say, Read this, and then tell me vanilla is boring. Spoiler: you won’t.
November 17, 2023
I enjoy cultural histories of things like salt (one of my favorite books) and board games. I looked forward to this one as vanilla is such a great topic.
But this was too boring to finish.
It started as a tale of the discovery and use of vanilla, but then devolved into a roll call of the places that grow the plant and their experience with it. Again and again and again, in a chapter that drained my enthusiasm. Add an overabundance of sidebars and recipes that break up the narrative, and I was done.
And the exclamation points! All the exclamation points! Signaling that the author just shared an interesting fact!
I'm disappointed in this book, but maybe I'll find a better account of the history of vanilla one day.
But this was too boring to finish.
It started as a tale of the discovery and use of vanilla, but then devolved into a roll call of the places that grow the plant and their experience with it. Again and again and again, in a chapter that drained my enthusiasm. Add an overabundance of sidebars and recipes that break up the narrative, and I was done.
And the exclamation points! All the exclamation points! Signaling that the author just shared an interesting fact!
I'm disappointed in this book, but maybe I'll find a better account of the history of vanilla one day.
August 20, 2021
A good, detailed, and highly readable book on the cultural history of vanilla. I especially liked Rain's focus in the final chapters on the working conditions today for so many vanilla farmers around the world. I was a bit frustrated by the lack of citations throughout the text, however--there is a short bibliography, but no actual citations.
January 1, 2018
Love these single substance culinary research books.
January 10, 2018
Interesting!
December 12, 2022
Plenty of extra info, somewhat disappointing in focus, numerous recipes. A who's who of the industry from the beginning to a few years ago.
December 25, 2022
Author's voice falls flat. Could have been interesting but written in a dull way
March 7, 2012
Who in the world would write 372 pages about vanilla? And who in their right mind would read all 372 of them? I can safely say that I now know more about vanilla than I ever knew there was to know. Patricia Rain is an anthropologist, cultural historian, cookbook author, lecturer and vanilla broker ... which is a lot to squeeze into one lifetime. She writes about vanilla: its natural history, its botany, its cultivation, its cultural significance, its spirituality, its biochemistry, its economic import, its psychobiology, and offers recipes, in the bargain. Her book -- exceptionally well researched, amply illustrated, entertainingly written -- is a sort of test for foodish geekness. If you enjoy it thoroughly, as I did, you pass the test.
July 26, 2010
Very interesting. I really learned a lot and it made me want to get a vanilla orchid to grow. Lots of recipes in there- I copied a few that I want to try. I did start to loose a bit of interest when it got to WWII and started talking about synthetic vanilla, and then what is happening now with that and real vanilla. The history part, though, I thought, was rather engrossing.
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September 6, 2007The history of Vanilla might be interesting. I couldn't finish this book either. Somewhere between cookbook (a few recipes) history lesson, cultural lesson and some other points of interest is where this book lies. Sadly the writing style isn't as engaging as other books I'm currently reading.
February 28, 2009
An excellent and extremely thorough journey through the world of vanilla. From the very birth of the bean as a food to the current agricultural practices, this book explores everything vanilla! A must read for all Gastronomes!!!
January 28, 2017
If you want to learn about vanilla, this is the place to start. Rain provides a foundation for all things vanilla, including stories, anecdotes, cooking tips, and a scattering of recipes to get you started on a life-long love of the spice that captivated the world.
May 21, 2008
A great history of vanilla with lots of recipes for vanilla beans and some invaluable information on the care of the vanilla orchid, one of my new houseplants.
June 6, 2008
Was interesting to read some of the historical facts about vanilla. I thought the book was not well organized and the citations were poor, for all I know she might of made of half of the book.
December 28, 2010
So much interesting information! Occassionally dry writing, but worth it.
June 26, 2012
A very interesting overview of vanilla. It is a little long and packed with information but is pretty easy to read. I very much enjoyed it.
January 12, 2014
A lovely arm-chair safari about a favorite commodity. Well worth the time.
Want to read
September 2, 2016[633.82]
March 27, 2021
Vanilla's fascinating history of Vanilla with all kinds of history and mind-blowing effects humans have and the impact of cultures, regions, and countries.
August 13, 2017
Patricia Rain and I worked for the same employer for a few years. I did not know her well, but we all knew her as The Vanilla Queen. I have never heard such passion speaking to someone about vanilla. She is truly in the right field. The book is fabulous and one you can refer to over and over for recipes and thorough history of the bean and products it has made. It is truly an exotic and sexy plant and this book sucks you right in.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews