That’s a perfect analogy! I received mine from** needscoffee**, and I’m a convert. Good thing winter has been overstaying its welcome, because it’s still perfect soup weather here. We’ve made potato soup, chicken soup, and beef stew in the last week. I definitely notice the aroma and flavor. Delicious!
Bay leaves also work very well in certain frying processes, which I don’t think has been mentioned yet. There’s a kind of meaty pork rind that has a few different names in different parts (chicharrones, torreznos, etc.) The leaves are fried in the oil/grease, along with cloves or whole heads of garlic and other stuff. I don’t know of anything else that calls for frying bay leaves, but it seems like it would work in a lot of dishes.
I just use standard McCormicks dried bay leaf. I’m sure fresh is better, but they still impart noticeable flavour to sauces and gravies when new.
We have a very very old large Costco-size container of bay leaves that we cook with. We try to put them in anything that we simmer for a long time to try to get rid of them, but it’s easy to forget. When we do use them, I can definitely tell the difference, or at least imagine that there’s a difference. I distinctly remember one time we made the same thing two weeks in a row, and the second time we forgot the bay leaves, and it definitely was slightly less impressive than the week before. But how much of that is to being satiated on that particular food? Hard to know.