The Wrong Smell

My new sub-BQE route through Red Hook and Sunset Park has many sensory pleasures. None more dramatic than the transition from  the smell zone of the DOT's Hamilton Avenue Asphalt Plant on the Gowanus Canal to the "nice smell" whose epicenter seems to be around Third Avenue and 35th Street. It's stronger here than up above on the BQE.

Looks like the vaunted BTB Research Bureau got this one wrong. Turns out it's not fenugreek being processed over in New Jersey wafting across the bay to Brooklyn after all. It's vanilla mixed with perhaps a bit of cocoa being processed by the Virginia Dare plant on Third Avenue. The company was founded in 1835, at one time it produced wine, root beer, lime rickey, as well as vanilla and all kinds of other products for cooking.  

I guess I've never known fenugreek at all. A bittersweet thought. Or smell. Oh hell.