Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my love affair with vanilla.
Sugar is my first love. You know the kind: It happens when you’re young and wide-eyed and the world is still sweet. You never forget it. It stays with you for many years, even after other loves, and the experience of having known it’s enough to make you friends for life.
But oh, vanilla.
Vanilla was my first (culinary) affair. I say this because after sugar, which is like an old friend, it was the one other ingredient—with its dark, dangerous, sweet smell—that seduced me into baking bliss.
For many years, all I knew and loved was the imitation vanilla I grew up with back home in the Philippines. It came in a tiny, short necked, amber bottle with what looked like hand-drawn fruit on a paper label on the front. I wonder if it’s still being sold. I remember it being unsophisticatedly thick and gloopy, but I didn’t think it was made of anything but delicious things that grew in lush, exotic forests.
I fell under its spell, the way its fragrance rounded out the flavors of my baked goods. Nothing smelled half as good as a cake baking in the oven after a scented swath of vanilla had been stirred into its batter, and the heat was coaxing the heavenly steam out of it. Later, mouthwateringly warm, a perfect slice of it would whisper that flavor to your taste buds. The flavor will quietly fight for your tongue’s affection alongside the cake’s sweetness, its texture, all the other complex flavors that give the cake its personality. And in the food wars of my mouth, it was the familiar flavor of vanilla that always won.
When I came to the States around five years ago, my baking habits migrated with me. My first trips to the grocery were to pick up big bottles of imitation, generic, store-brand vanilla. I thought I had hit the gold mine. Here, imitation vanilla is smooth, easy to pour and measure. It dropped elegantly in a dark river into my measuring spoon. None of that silly plopping-out-of-the-bottle business, the way imitation vanilla did back home because it was temperamentally thick.
Even more than any of these qualities, the imitation vanilla here…it smelled like dreams.
About a year into baking in the States, I decided to splurge on a small bottle of pure, premium vanilla with my first salary. I bought it at a chef’s supply store and I felt wicked doing so. It was expensive—around $10 for a 4 fl. oz. bottle. I kept it unopened for several months, saving it for a special dessert.
And then my Lola Luz passed away.
Lola had lived with us for all of my life in the Philippines. She was my spinster grandaunt, my favorite feisty old crone (sorry, Lola!) who took care of me all those years when Mama was here in the States. She went to PTA meetings, taught me to use lampunaya (nightshade) leaves for bruises, made sure my school uniforms were pressed. I loved her for taking care of me and, because I was young, hated her for the same. We squabbled about everything because I inherited her feisty gene, from the proper way to hold a crochet needle (like a pencil, not like you’re going to stab someone with it) to the best way to work on fractions (she was a retired teacher and had her old-school ways of solving problems both mathematical and figurative). But for all the arguing we did, I can say she was as organic to my childhood as playing with mud pies, hide-and-seek under a merciless provincial sun, learning how to roller-skate and ballet lessons.
She died a little over a year after I first came to the States. I couldn’t go home for her funeral because I had just started a new job. I was devastated. I wanted so desperately to go home—for closure. I’m the sort of person who needs rituals to bookend events in my life. I was faced with the possibility of never grieving properly, as much as someone like me needed to.
And so, I went through my favorite ritual. Taking out the bottle of premium vanilla from its hiding place in the cupboard, I picked the most complicated recipe in one of my oldest cookbooks and started measuring. And sifting. And beating.
It took me six hours total to bake and decorate that White Chocolate Mousse Cake With Strawberries—my very first made with pure vanilla.
Alone in the kitchen, save for my ingredients and tools, I found a way to grieve my grandaunt’s passing in the best way I knew how: through motions that were so familiar they brought me the kind of quiescence necessary to deal with her death. Not only that, but I discovered how pure vanilla was so remarkably different from the imitation kind, so much that I haven’t looked back since. Just the smell of it—strong, clear and uncompromising—as I opened that bottle was enough to lift that cloud of flour and grieving that hung over my kitchen.
Then, I knew: If imitation vanilla smelled like dreams, the pure kind smelled like waking up.
I smile to myself as I write this now, because those descriptions of how my first bottle of pure vanilla smelled is like painting, with words, a picture of the unique character that was Lola Luz. It’s just like her to come back to me, after all these years, to teach me a lesson. Baking that cake taught me this: Never settle. Be courageous in choosing the pure and the good, in baking as much as in life. Look for, seek out, wait for that one premium, prime ingredient. The real thing, one that makes your guests say, as they bite into the gifts your hands made, “I’ve been asleep all this time, and the waking up is so sweet.”
Here’s wishing you a week full of waking up to sweet, pure, real things.
* Thank you to my brother W. for designing the vanilla pods that started off this post. I owe you cookies, Manong. With real vanilla, of course. 
** Here are pictures of that White Chocolate Mousse Cake With Strawberries, which I’ve re-created countless times for many other celebrations (like Bona’s birthday) since that night. And if you’re interested, my favorite brand of vanilla is Nielsen-Massey’s Madagascar Bourbon Pure Vanilla. Costco also sells a Kirkland Signature one that’s easier on the pocket, but still excellent to use.
j.ana | 
11 15th, 2008| 
