Food: vanilla vs French vanilla

Self-tutoring about food: the tutor mentions an interesting preference.

When I was a kid, I liked ice cream. Vanilla wasn’t my favourite, but was better than nothing, for sure. When I was about eight I was served yellow ice cream. What was it, I asked?

“French vanilla,” I was told. My mother, it seems, came to prefer it, so we often got French vanilla after that. I was never told why it was yellow, but never asked either. I just thought “French” would mean “fancier,” and it seemed obvious that yellow vanilla is fancier than white.

I never bought ice cream before I had kids. Once they were eating on their own, my wife and I would buy them ice cream to have for dessert. It took a few years, but they settled on vanilla as their favourite flavour (believe it or not). We almost always bought ordinary vanilla, the way I recall it.

This morning, my younger son commented that, with “yellow” vanilla, it’s always sure to be good. White vanilla, he elaborated, can be really good, but can also fall down a bit in some cases.

It turns out that French vanilla is yellow because it contains egg yolks. Therefore, it’s bound to be richer. Moreover, with such investment, one can probably suspect a higher baseline of quality.

Enjoy your ice cream:)

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