Alternatives to vanilla?

Is "no flavor" ice cream the same as "sweet cream" ice cream? I've had that before, without any vanilla in it, and it was pretty bland.
 
Although honey could work, it has the problem that it's also a sweetener as well as a flavoring. For some dishes, it's hard to get a strong honey flavoring without adding lots of it, at which point those things can start to become too sweet. Not sure if it's possible to do a honey flavoring, without the fructose and glucose, before 20th century food chemistry is developed.

The Romans (supposedly) made a taffy out of honey and pepper. My high school Latin class made a batch of this taffy, and it tasted like spicy, sickeningly sweet gloop. The ancient Mediterranean only had honey as a natural sweetner. Unfortunately, the Romans also used "sugar of lead", a powdered form of lead, as the world's first artificial non-nutritive sweetener. Consequences predictable.
 
If you have ever had No Flavor Ice Cream [used to be sold to Soda Bars for Making flavored Milkshakes] You know that Vanilla is a Definite Flavor.

Unfortunately I find it hard to find places that still make real Milkshakes.

I haven't had that yet, but I've made ice cream from historical recipes with just cream, sugar syrup and milk, and there is a definite difference. The problem is, the difference between vanilla ice cream and plain ice cream is no greater than that between vanilla ice cream and "vanilla" ice cream. Hereabouts, and from what I hear and read that also goes for the USA, vanilla flavouring is often used as a background to other sweet flavourants. In Germany, we have a particularly abominable thing called Vanillinzucker, a sugar infused with artificial vanilline, that gets put into almost every imaginable kind of cake, cookie or custard and has educated generations to taste around vanilla. It's also a fairly unobtrusive and bland taste, tamer than real vanilla and dosed rather low. To many of my friends, their first taste of actual vanilla ice cream or pudding was a bit of a shock. Personally, I suspect that's not too differennt across the pond, though I think there's more of the genuine article and less Better Living Through Chemistry.
 
The Romans (supposedly) made a taffy out of honey and pepper. My high school Latin class made a batch of this taffy, and it tasted like spicy, sickeningly sweet gloop. The ancient Mediterranean only had honey as a natural sweetner. Unfortunately, the Romans also used "sugar of lead", a powdered form of lead, as the world's first artificial non-nutritive sweetener. Consequences predictable.

The earliest incontrovertible evidence for taffy outside the Arab world that I've seen comes from the Mappae Clavicula, so I would be cautious with Roman taffy. Honey and pepper are a common (and tasty) combination, though. It is also posasible (though not certain) that sesame and poppyseed were made either into marzipan-like confections or hard-sugar bars with cooked honey. Both work, the evidence I've seen supports either interpretation.

I can't see the spicy-sweet combination doing too well in the modern West, though - the general tendency of its post-medieval cuisine has been towards perceived purity, away from balance.
 
So you've created...barbecue sauce? Or rather, ketchup?

Ketchup is what I'm referring too. My barbecue sauce is much more complicated.

The earliest incontrovertible evidence for taffy outside the Arab world that I've seen comes from the Mappae Clavicula, so I would be cautious with Roman taffy.

But considering taffy, like most candies, is just a matter of cooking sugar and water to a certain temperature (which, before thermometers, can be tested by how the mixture drips off of a spoon) and then kneading it... there's no technical reason why they couldn't have done it.
 
It's not unlikely that Native Americans in the Northeastern Woodlands made taffy out of maple sap, too. We know that they introduced the process of boiling down maple sap into maple sugar, and there's a soft-ball stage in the middle of this process in which the sap takes on the consistency of taffy. The tradition of sugar-on-snow in Quebec and New England (in which small amounts of boiled-down syrup are poured across packed snow to make taffy) probably originated in Pre-Columbian times.
 
Top