Extracts, Essences, and Political Effects: How Vanilla Shapes American Life

French Vanilla ice cream. Vanilla extracts and flavorings. Warm vanilla sugar scented candles. Vanilla Ice. This dissertation examines the politics and social worlds of vanilla—as an ingredient, a flavor, a fragrance, and a euphemism for race—in the context of everyday life in the United States. The project begins with the vanilla bean, a cured brown-black fruit of an orchid indigenous to Mexico which wealthy Americans first came to covet in the nineteenth century, typically for use in ice cream recipes. From there, the dissertation traces cultural uses and meanings of vanilla, including chapters devoted to the regulation of vanilla flavorings by the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act in the context of mass immigration and the Great Migration in the early twentieth century; the relationship between vanilla fragrances and expressions of gender, sexuality, and femininity; and the use of vanilla to name Whiteness. Ultimately, this research explores how vanilla contains multitudes yet communicates the ordinary alongside normative ideological positions as they are tied to class status, ethnicity, gender, and race in the United States.