Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid

Rating:
Summary: Lively, revealing, and enthusiastically recommended
Review: Vanilla is one of the most popular flavoring spices in the world and is even a major ingredient in perfumes, paint and tires, but the story of vanilla is a botanical mystery that only a twelve-year-old African slave solved. Vanilla would not bear fruit outside of its Mexican origins, until the slave developed a process for cultivating it and turned it into a labor-intensive agricultural crop. Lively, revealing, and enthusiastically recommended reading, Tim Ecott's Vanilla: Travels In Search Of The Ice Cream Orchid, should not be missed by any kitchen cook, gourmet diner, or botanist.

Rating:
Summary: Vanilla is anything but plain!
Review: You might think that you would have to be interested in vanilla, cooking, or maybe Madagascar, or Mexico, or some of the other exotic locations visited in this book in order to enjoy it. If so, you are wrong. Vanilla does give enticing glimpses into these places, but this book has merits beyong the great travelogue it is.

This book is many stories in one. It is a book of history; economy; theft; magic; and love. Mr. Ecott's writing is an exciting mixture of anecdote and explanation that has a pace more often found in well written fiction.

His description of his meal in Tahiti will leave your mouth watering, and you will see the inside of the traders shacks, with Ecott so skillfully recounting the detail you will have to remind yourself it is his memory, and not your own.

Add to that the fact that is a fascinating basic reference work for a subject horribly difficult to find information on, and you a have a real winner.