The story of America's favorite flavor

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VANILLA: TRAVELS IN SEARCH OF THE ICE CREAM ORCHID

By Tim Ecott

Grove, $24, 278 pages

REVIEWED BY ARTHUR TUCKER

Friends and relatives who've been on trips to exotic locales abroad have sometimes given me what they genuinely assume is a privileged gift, bottles of Mexican or Caribbean "vanilla." The problem is that their thoughtful purchase wasn't the pure vanilla they probably believed it to be but rather dilutions of cheap coumarin, vanilla adulterated with coumarin, or, even more deviously, synthetic vanillin and coumarin.

The odor of these is more hay-like than vanilla, and, when you consider that coumarin is banned by the FDA from foods and beverages because it can cause anemia, it's not really a gift that I savor all that much. But today over 90% of vanilla-flavored foods contain artificial vanillin and not real vanilla at all, and some people don't even know the difference.

But they do know that they love vanilla. BBC reporter Tim Ecott recounts the history of this longtime beloved flavoring in his "Vanlla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid," bringing together geography, politics, economics, and science to tell a multilayered, intricate tale.

Science knows about 100 species of the Vanilla orchid. But only one, Vanillaplanifolia, has any real economic importance, although two other species, with slightly different scents, are cultivated and have their markets. Vanilla orchids aren't corsage-type blossoms, but a vine from Mexico with tiny celadon-green flowers.

Vanilla has been a beloved flavoring in desserts for centuries, but as Mr. Ecott shows, it's had other uses, too, and some of them surprising. The author relates, for example, how vanilla was regarded as a kind of Viagra: Famous lovers such as Casanova and Madame de Pompadour (and even the Marquis de Sade) made use of combinations of vanilla and chocolate as an aphrodisiac. Perhaps more impresssive, in 1762, a German physician, Bezaar Zimmerman, claimed that "No fewer than 342 impotent men, by drinking vanilla decoctions, have changed into astonishing lovers of at least as many women."