When we first came to Kentucky I took a Medieval English history grad level course. The paper I wrote was about spices and artifice in Medieval aristocratic cookery.  In the Sunset Magazine tradition I decided to test my hypothesis about cooking with period spices, it turned out to be quite an adventure.  Along the way I realized that vanilla and chocolate are mostly Renaissance developments in western food preparation. Most of the popular (read prestigious) spices used among the upper classes tended to be discoveries brought back from the crusades in the Middle East, spices we now associate particularly with Christmas.  This was the one time that we the people got to eat anything that had these spices in it due to the invitations the farm folk and villagers received to feast at the local manor house or castle. Among these spices are cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and rose water.  Rose water had great popularity before the discovery of vanilla.  It turns out that it tastes good in food but only if you can get out of your mind that you are not eating something cosmetic.  Once you can think of cake and not cheap hand lotion from the dime store the cake tastes pretty good.  We used rose water in a little hands-on cooking event with the kids in grade school activity, the school kids had a similar response. In general, we liked it, but it is easy to understand how vanilla pushed it out of the picture.