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Essence of Vanilla
Cut three vanilla beans into very small shreds, put them into a bottle with one pint of brandy, and cork the bottle. Shake the vanilla occasionally and in the course of three months' time it will be ready for use.
A homemade vanilla extract, and one of the simplest things in the book — but the ratio is far weaker than what you would buy today, and the three-month wait is real.
- The bean-to-spirit ratio is thinThree beans to a pint gives roughly a fifth the strength of commercial pure vanilla extract, which is built on about 13 ounces of beans per gallon of spirit — nearer sixteen beans per pint. Expect a delicate flavoring rather than a drop-for-drop substitute for the bottle in your cupboard.
- "Essence" here means extractIn period usage essence, extract and tincture were largely interchangeable for an alcoholic infusion.
- Brandy is doing chemical workStandard brandy at about 40 percent alcohol is well above the 35 percent that is the legal minimum for commercial vanilla extract and a sound working strength for infusion. A lower-proof spirit extracts more slowly and keeps less well; the alcohol is the preservative as much as the solvent.
- Shred, or split and chopSlitting each pod lengthwise before cutting it up exposes the oily interior; the recipe's "very small shreds" already achieves this. Beans left whole and intact will take longer to give up their flavor.
- The three months is not paddingCold maceration is slow. Six to eight weeks gives usable flavor, but the rounded, less raw-alcohol character arrives somewhere past the third month and keeps improving for a year.
- Yield and keepingOne pint, and it will outlast you. Store the corked bottle in a dark cupboard — light degrades vanillin — and top up with more brandy as you draw it off. The beans can be left in indefinitely.
- Bean varietyOscar would most likely have had Bourbon (Reunion) or Mexican beans; Madagascar's plantations were only getting going. Tahitian beans are more floral and less classically "vanilla," so choose deliberately rather than by price.
Vanilla is the cured seed pod of a Mexican orchid, used by the Totonac and later the Aztecs long before Europeans reached it, and for three centuries it could only be grown where its native pollinator lived. The hand-pollination technique that made plantation vanilla possible is generally credited to Edmond Albius on Reunion in the 1840s, after which cultivation spread and vanilla became merely expensive rather than nearly unobtainable. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms at the turn of the century, commercial extracts were widely sold but widely adulterated as well — coumarin from tonka bean was a common stand-in — which is reason enough for a hotel kitchen to macerate its own beans in good brandy and know exactly what was in the bottle. It is a standing preparation, made once and drawn on for months of ice creams, custards and pastry.