We are mostly enraged at Biden goofing up hideously in the Afghanistan exodus, so I am now going to make your day a bit nicer…I hope. I wrote this a long time ago, and it isn’t dated, but undoubtedly in 2001 or earlier.
Once, a long time ago in the fair city of Philadelphia, lived a man named Henry Breyer. Henry decided to go into the ice cream business. After all, ice cream did originate in Philadelphia, and even George Washington had his own favorite recipe for ice cream. Henry Breyer wanted to not only make good ice cream, but he wanted to sell a lot of it and become rich and famous. This he did, and by a wonderful gimmick, which, to this day, has never been realized for all its pure hokum.
If you brew a pot of coffee, do you mix the grounds with the coffee? Of course not, because after the flavor has been extracted from the ground up coffee beans, you throw away the garbage, and have a nice cup of coffee. To make Vanilla, coffee, tea, chocolate, or any other flavor or extract, you boil the beans or leaves, till the flavor is extracted and transferred to the liquid, then you throw away the remains, because they are worthless.
Henry Breyer had a wonderful idea! An idea which has been copied, and fooled the public for over a hundred years. Rather than go to the trouble of throwing away the used vanilla bean garbage, he would grind them up and insert them into his vanilla ice cream, telling his customers, that if they didn’t see the “real vanilla beans” in their ice cream, it wasn’t real vanilla at all.
My Dad (and Grandad, and great grandad) were druggists in Washington D.C., and I grew up in my Dad’s store. I was wonderful. He had a marble soda fountain, and of course sold Breyers ice cream. I believed the advertising for many years, till I got into the ice cream business in Philadelphia, and sold over 100,000 gallons of ice cream in my ten stores in 1971 alone. I learned the fine points off ice cream, and realized that Henry Breyer had perpetrated one of the greatest hoaxes in the history of food; similar to a P.T. Barnum exploit. In Barnum’s museum in New York 150 years ago, after his customers had paid their admission, they saw a sign with an arrow pointing to “The Egress.” Thinking it was another exhibit, they found themselves out on the street!
In my stores, customers constantly asked, “Where are the real vanilla beans?” After answering their question a thousand times it seemed, I printed up an explanation of the garbage vanilla bean fraud, and had it on all the counters in my stores. Customers would read it and laugh, as though they had heard a really funny joke. That stopped the vanilla bean queries, but the sham continues to this day.
Here I am in the wonderful American West, and the old vanilla beans in ice cream pops up occasionally. I just thought I’d tell you how one man got rich and famous. He did it by grinding up the garbage vanilla beans, installing them in his ice cream, and advertising that it was the one thing that made his vanilla ice cream really authentic. Let’s see now, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.” Isn’t that the way it goes? It does with vanilla ice cream anyway!
Don Stott– don@coloradogold.com.