The bottle in my grandmother's cupboard is cracked and dusty, small and empty. Open, the sweetness of vanilla tinged with the bitter tang of alcohol is released. A 60 year old memory escapes too - my grandmother's genie. People used to believe that vanilla had magical powers. My grandmother, who didn't believe in magic, had an almost pathological aversion to vanilla. You'd never catch her ordering anything but strawberry ice cream, she never ate her pie ala mode, and yet you could almost always find her in her kitchen, where the sweet scent of vanilla seemed to have permeated the walls.