Vanilla and the Twelve-Year-Old Who Solved It: The History of the World's Most Expensive Flavor After Saffron
The word "vanilla" has come to mean plain, which is the strangest fate of any flavor in the kitchen, because vanilla is an orchid, the only edible fruit of a family of twenty-five thousand species, and for three centuries it was one of the most difficult and expensive things a cook could buy. It still is, by weight, second only to saffron. The reason is a flower that opens for a single morning, a bee that lives in one part of Mexico, and a problem that Europe's greatest botanists could not solve until an enslaved twelve-year-old on an island in the Indian Ocean solved it with a stick.
The orchid and the Totonac
Vanilla planifolia is a climbing orchid native to the humid forests of eastern Mexico and Central America. Its flower is pale, greenish and short-lived, opening at dawn and wilting by afternoon, and its fruit is a long green pod that, on the vine, smells of nothing. The people who first learned to use it were the Totonac, of what is now Veracruz, who cured the pods by sweating and sunning them until they turned dark, oily and fragrant. The Aztecs, who conquered the Totonac in the fifteenth century, took vanilla as tribute and added it to their bitter cacao drink; the pairing of vanilla and chocolate, which the modern world treats as obvious, is older than Europe's knowledge of either. Our chocolate history tells the other half of that story.
Three centuries of failure
The Spanish brought vanilla to Europe with chocolate in the sixteenth century, and Europe wanted more of it than Mexico could supply. Cuttings of the vine were taken to botanical gardens and then to tropical colonies: Java, Mauritius, Réunion, the Caribbean. The vines grew. They flowered. And they produced almost nothing, decade after decade, because the vanilla orchid is pollinated in the wild by a small Mexican bee, and outside its range there was no insect that could do the job. For three hundred years, every commercial vanilla bean in the world came from Mexico, and Mexico knew it.
Réunion, 1841
The French island of Réunion, then called Bourbon, east of Madagascar, had vanilla vines that flowered uselessly on the estate of a planter named Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont. In 1841 Edmond, an enslaved boy of about twelve who worked in the garden and whom Bellier-Beaumont had taught something of botany, showed his master that he could make the flowers set fruit. His method was a sliver of bamboo or a thorn to lift the flap of tissue, the rostellum, that separates the flower's male and female parts, and a thumb to press them together. It worked every time. Bellier-Beaumont, to his credit, told everyone and credited the boy; within a few years the method had spread across Réunion and then to Madagascar, and the islands became the vanilla-producing center of the world, which they remain. Edmond was freed in 1848, when France abolished slavery in its colonies, and took the surname Albius, from the Latin for white, for reasons still debated. He died poor in 1880. A statue of him stands in Sainte-Suzanne on Réunion, and every vanilla bean grown outside Mexico today, billions of flowers a year, is pollinated by hand, one flower at a time, in the single morning each is open, using his method.
Why a bean costs what it costs
Hand pollination is only the beginning. A vanilla vine takes three or four years to flower. Each pollinated flower becomes one pod that ripens over nine months. The green pods are then cured over several months: scalded in hot water, sweated in blankets, sunned by day and rested by night, and finally conditioned in boxes for weeks, during which enzymes develop the vanillin and the hundreds of other compounds that make up the aroma. A pound of cured beans represents thousands of hand-pollinated flowers and most of a year of labor, almost all of it on small farms in Madagascar, where cyclones and price swings make the crop a gamble. Add theft, which is common enough that farmers guard the vines at harvest, and a price that has ranged from a few dollars a kilo to several hundred within a decade, and you have the reason a single good vanilla bean costs what a bottle of wine does.
Vanillin, and the imitation
In the 1870s German chemists isolated vanillin, the main aroma compound, and soon learned to make it from pine bark, then from clove oil, then from wood pulp waste and petrochemicals. Synthetic vanillin is a few hundred times cheaper than the bean and is what "vanilla flavor" in most commercial food means. It is not fake in any meaningful sense, since it is the same molecule, but it is only one molecule where the cured bean has hundreds, which is why real vanilla smells of dried fruit, smoke, rum and flowers and imitation vanilla smells of vanillin. The difference shows most where vanilla is the point: in a custard, a caramel, a plain cake, a pot of drinking chocolate.
The origins
Madagascar and Réunion grow the "Bourbon" type, from the island's old name: rich, creamy, sweet, the classic. Mexico still grows its native vanilla, spicier and darker. Tahiti grows a different species, Vanilla tahitensis, floral, fruity and cherry-like, prized by pastry chefs. Uganda, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea have growing industries. The bean on the shelf of our baking section and the extract beside it carry the origin on the label for the same reason a chocolate bar does.
What to do with a real bean
Split it lengthwise, scrape the seeds into whatever you are making, and drop the pod in too; the pod has as much flavor as the seeds. Afterward, rinse the pod, dry it, and bury it in a jar of sugar, where it perfumes the sugar for months. Our caramel guide uses vanilla the way the Aztecs did, beside something dark and rich; a scraped bean in a pot of cream on the way to caramel is the whole argument for buying the real thing. It is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ships nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Somewhere in Madagascar this morning, someone opened a flower with a thorn and a thumb so that you could.
