Uncle Bill was proud of his Hungarian heritage. His father took a long and arduous route from Hungary to get to the United States. As a young man, he was in contact with family and friends who had emigrated from Hungary and settled near Toledo, Ohio, where they found work in underground coal mines. Intending to join them there, he made his way to Italy. Not speaking Italian he boarded a ship bound for Mexico, either because he simply didn’t understand the difference between Central and North America, or because he was swindled by the operators of the ship, who were, among other things, transporting laborers from Europe to Mexico to work in mines there. He arrived in Mexico and soon was working in a mining operation in that nation. However, he kept his original goal in mind and when the opportunity arose he walked away from the mine in Mexico and kept walking. He walked all the way to Ohio where he found the family and friends he intended to reach. Surrounded by other recent immigrants from Hungary, he spoke Hungarian as his primary language. He married and they had a large family. Several of his sons moved from Ohio to Grant County, South Dakota, where they founded a small surface mining operation, digging coal which was sold as heating fuel. He later joined them and moved into the home of son Bill and his wife Sybil after they moved to the Black Hills to run a church camp. Sybil insisted that he use English in their house and he learned quite a bit of the language towards the end of his life.

Son Bill, having grown up in a Hungarian speaking family, was bilingual. His services were employed translating when visitors from Hungary occasionally visited the Black Hills. One of the pieces of his Hungarian heritage he treasured was making pizzelles from scratch. He had obtained a pizzelle iron and later gave irons and recipes to nieces and nephews, including our family. He steadfastly maintained that although it is common for pizzelles to be identified as Italian waffle cookies, their origin is in Hungary, not Italy.

Bill maintained that the secrets of the recipe included getting the iron heated to exactly the right temperature. When he was quite elderly and lived in a retirement apartment, he would rise early in the morning to make pizzelles because he was convinced that variations in the electricity caused by other apartments using their ovens caused his oven to be inconsistent in temperature. Bill made pizzelles for church rummage sales and gave large containers of the cookies to family members. His second secret to his version of the delicacy was the use of pure vanilla extract.

According to bon appétit, ninety-nine percent of the world’s vanilla extract is fake imitation vanilla that is flavored with a lab-produced version of the same chemical compound that occurs naturally in real vanilla. Bill insisted in using pure vanilla. He got his vanilla directly from Mexico, traveling there on vacations and purchasing quantities of it. Pure vanilla extract is made by soaking vanilla beans in an alcohol solution. According to the FDA, vanilla extract must be at least 35% alcohol with a minimum of 100 grams of vanilla beans per liter. When purchasing pure extract, check the ingredients. It should list only vanilla beans, alcohol, and water. There should be no additives like sugar, artificial colors, or flavors.

I have made pizzelles using the iron and recipe Bill gave us and I have used the pure vanilla extract we used to get from him in other recipes, including homemade ice cream. I developed a liking for its flavor and am careful to purchase pure vanilla extract for use in all sorts of recipes. I tend to be generous with the extract, often adding a bit more than the recipe specifies.

Vanilla itself has an interesting story. What we call vanilla beans are not beans at all, but rather the pods of an orchid plant that originated in what is modern Mexico. Totonac Indigenous people who settled around 600 on Mexico’s Atlantic coast were first attracted to the scent of the orchids and began to use the pods to flavor various foods. The Aztecs used vanilla to flavor xocoatl, the drink they produced from cacao and other spices. When contact was made with Europeans, cacao and vanilla were exported from Mexico to Europe. Many attempts were made to grow vanilla across Europe and in Africa, but early attempts failed. In their natural state the plants are pollinated by a unique species of bees that have adapted to the unique shape of the plants. Without knowing how the plants were pollinated, they could not be grown away from Mexico. However, a 12-year-old enslaved boy who lived 180 hers ago o a remote Indian Ocean Island, discovered how to hand pollinate the plants. That knowledge was shared and today the majority of the world’s vanilla is produced in Madagascar. Vanilla is also produced in French Polynesia, Uganda, China, and Indonesia. A popular variety, Heilala Vanilla, is produced in Tonga in the South Pacific.

Vanilla blends well with other flavors including chocolate, hazelnut, brown sugar, cinnamon, and coffee. I like to use it with cinnamon to flavor a variety of foods including breakfast oats, cooked apples, berries, and other foods. Pure vanilla is expensive, but it is one of the luxuries I grant myself even though I confess I rarely invest the time required to make Uncle Bill’s pizzelle recipe. When I do make pizzelles, however, you can be certain that I would never use imitation vanilla.

As I write this morning, I’ve got some rolled oats soaking in a mixture of plain yogurt and milk, flavored with pure vanilla extract, cinnamon, and chia seeds and sweetened with a bit of honey from the colonies on the farm. A mixture of blueberries, blackberries and raspberries are adding their flavors. Just writing about it makes me hungry for breakfast already. I credit Uncle Bill with refining my taste buds when it comes to vanilla and I think of him each time I reach for the bottle of extract in the cupboard.