Reframing the Vanilla Girl

Because sometimes simple is best

Pull Up A Chair is a weekly newsletter containing all the things I’d like to be chatting about if we could hang out together in real life.

• 🥄 Fridge tidying overnight oats. I love overnight oats. I just do. But when Julia Turshen shared these fantastic ideas recently about using up nearly empty jars, I realised I had to share my related tip: using them for oats! I tend to assume that a glob at the bottom of a jam/ peanut butter/ chocolate spread/ applesauce jar, plus all the little bits around the edges of the jar, adds up to about one tablespoon. I just count it as such and add it into my standard overnight oats formula: two tablespoons of those spreads (just one or a mixture), 50 grams of oats, and 80 millilitres of milk. Sometimes I stir in milled chia seeds, but only if I happen to have them in the kitchen. Favourite combinations include peanut butter and jam, applesauce and cinnamon, and multiple flavours of jam.

• 🧥 New Spring Jacket from M&S. It is finally spring jacket weather here in Edinburgh. After weeks of desperately looking at my lighter jackets but putting my heavy coat on instead, I’ve been able to go out in my thin mac instead without regretting it. I bought this ‘car coat’ from Marks & Spencer, and it’s fantastic - genuinely waterproof, huge pockets, and has a gorgeous drape. One could almost believe it to be from Cos. (I realised earlier today that I am dressed head-to-toe in Marks and Spencers, other than novelty socks with kookaburras on and white Converse… and I’m not mad about it.) 

• 🥚 Hearty ‘bistro’ salad. At the start of the year, I put hearty salads on my ‘in for 2023’ list, so I clicked through to Aleksandra Crapanzano’s Wall Street Journal piece on satisfying salads as soon as I saw it - and went about recreating some of her ideas for this week’s lunches. At lunchtime on Wednesday I boiled a whole bag of new potatoes, and the last eggs in the box, and off the back of that I’ve had a full week of lunches. 

Before I continue, some quick housekeeping. Last week, I got so carried away raving about the sausage and potato roast with arugula recipe on Smitten Kitchen that I forgot to include the link. Here it is. 

The lovely Olivia Muenter had her 30th birthday this week, and wrote a beautiful post about it - which I’m sure I’ll reread more than once as my own turn-of-the-decade approaches:

It's all flaky sea salt.

 There was one particular section that struck me, which I wanted to share with you:

As the phrase goes: It’s all gravy. Though, I am left with one question. Why does it have to be, of all things, gravy? I don’t feel that word really works for me here. So maybe it’s more like, it’s all flaky sea salt. It’s all flaky sea salt to me, because that’s the thing that makes all the best foods, impossibly, even better. The perfect chocolate chip cookie becomes a religious experience. A radish with butter becomes art. Fresh, hot bread becomes something you close your eyes while experiencing, because it’s as good as finally hugging someone after a longtime spent apart or your favorite song or taking a deep breath. Because you don’t want to forget just how good it is. Just when you think it can’t get better, flaky sea salt goes against the odds and makes it happen. Maybe it’s no wonder so many of us crave the ocean like it’s necessary to survival. 

My equivalent to Olivia’s flaky sea salt is, it turns out, vanilla. I love vanilla.

The ‘vanilla girl’ has been a trend on TikTok lately, where, as ever, it is problematically full of skinny, white, wealthy young women with expensive blonde hair or highlights. This Glamour piece sums up the vanilla girl aesthetic in a much more inclusive way, and one that I’m happier to participate in. To me, being all about vanilla ties into my word of the year, gentle: it’s about making the most of simple uncomplicated joys. Instead of gilding the lily with ornate baked goods, fancy dinners, or things that are expensive for the sake of being expensive, it’s about choosing the best ingredients I can afford, to make simple things the best they can be. Like ‘gentle’, I think vanilla can be under-appreciated but is powerful. 

I will always take really good vanilla ice-cream over a novelty flavour; the richness of the flavour is like nothing else. In the golden age of Pizza Express (more on that in this fantastic piece on Vittles) the vanilla ice cream that accompanied the wedges of chocolate fudge cake were freckled with vanilla, and almost heady. I only learnt very recently about the history of vanilla; although we associate it with Madagascar, vanilla comes from South America, and the bees that pollinate the plants only live on that continent. It was a 12 year old enslaved Black boy, Edmund Albius, who discovered that the plants could be pollinated by hand. For more on this colonial history - and the origin of the use of ‘vanilla’ to dismissively describe ‘boring’ sex - this excellent piece by Joseph Lamour is worth a read.   

For more of that heady vanilla scent, I adore Lush’s Lord of Misrule perfume. It pairs vanilla with patchouli and black pepper for something that’s a bit hippy, a bit sexy, and - to me - totally intoxicating. I can’t remember if Taylor Jenkins Reid describes the perfume that Daisy Jones wears, but in my mind, this is how she smells. For something a bit simpler, The Body Shop have a plain vanilla eau de toilette, which is sweet and creamy but not ‘sugary’, so to speak. For application throughout the day, I love Burts Bees’ vanilla bean lip balm, which is cheap and small enough that I have a few in different coats and bags.     

The other association with vanilla is in cake, whether that’s a simple but sophisticated Victoria sponge or a multicoloured Funfetti party piece. It’s this sweeter application of vanilla that I have more often. I first started drinking soya vanilla lattes because of the joke that it’s a ‘three bean soup’, but they have absolutely become my drink of choice. And when I discovered that most of the flavoured syrup in Starbucks’s famous Caramel Macchiato is in fact vanilla (the caramel is just a drizzle on top), I was right there. At home, I will use vanilla-flavoured coffee too, usually from Little’s, who make it as instant, ground, or pods - and for extra sweetness I sometimes add a tiny bit of maple syrup, which is just the best (especially when ice cold). 

As usual, I’m writing this newsletter in a chain cafe shop (I feel guilty taking up table space in one of the indies), and, although I knew I was planning to write about vanilla today, I had completely forgotten that when I picked up a vanilla-filled Loacker wafer to have with my coffee. 

Speak soon,

Lily

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