Oddly enough, in the
United States, if
vanilla extract doesn't have
alcohol in it, it is required to be called imitation
vanilla. This is because the
FDA has rules about what makes a
standard recipe for various things, and vanilla requires alcohol in the official recipe. The bureaucrats apparently get all wound up if you call something vanilla extract that isn't
USDA-compliant.
How'd I find this bit out? I was bored in an organic food store once and found myself wondering why a place that was so organic would have the atrocity known as imitation vanilla.
What I want to know is, given this apparently silly requirement on vanilla, why can't we get various imitation cheese products to be called by that name?