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| View Larger Image | Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid
by Tim Ecott
| | List Price: | $24.00 |  | | 10 New starting at: | $10.98 | | 20 Used starting at: | $3.36 | | | | | Sales Rank: | 478222 | | Studio: | Grove/Atlantic | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 278 | | Publication Date: | December 31, 1969 | | Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Book Description
Vanilla is the fascinating, kaleidoscopic story of one of the world's most exotic and sensual plants and how it transformed history. From the Aztec Indians to Martha Stewart, vanilla has been synonymous with sweetening foods. Yet it's also in chili, perfume, paint, desserts, car tires, and soda. In Tim Ecott's Vanilla, learn the fascinating history of the world's most sought-after flavoring. The story of vanilla is a botanical mystery, a plant that traveled the world but would not bear fruit outside Mexico until a twelve-year-old African slave on an island figured out how to cultivate it. Now endangered in the wild and the world's most labor-intensive agricultural crop, vanilla is more expensive to procure today than at any time in its history. Tim Ecott follows its journey from Mexico to Madagascar and back to America, meeting the farmers, the brokers, and the ice-cream makers who make vanilla a multimillion-dollar business. In the tradition of books like Tobacco, Tim Ecott's Vanilla is a whimsical journey that chronicles the incredible power of one velvety brown, long, and slender bean. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 2 reviews)
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Lively, revealing, and enthusiastically recommended 
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.
January 06, 2005 | |
Vanilla is anything but plain!
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.
October 14, 2004 | |
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