VANILLA ORCHID
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What
may be the first American recipe
for vanilla ice cream,
written
in the same hand that penned the
Declaration of Independence, is
among Thomas Jefferson's papers
at the Library of Congress.
The
vanilla flavoring Jefferson used
in his kitchen, made from the
seedpods of a rare tropical
orchid [see "Age and Beauty," by
Kenneth M. Cameron,
, had already been popular in
Europe for nearly three centuries.
The
Aztecs showed the Spaniards how vanilla
could
sweeten their chocolate and
perfume their cigars, and the long, dark
vanilla beans became part of the Spanish
empire's rich colonial trade as early as
the middle of the sixteenth century.
Privateers
from European nations were soon looking
for the stuff during their raids of
Spanish galleons, and their booty was
directly responsible for Queen Elizabeth
I's passion for |
vanilla-flavored desserts. By the end of
the seventeenth century such influential
Englishmen as Samuel Pepys and
Christopher Wren were frequenting
coffeehouses where cocoa drinks,
flavored with vanilla, were popular menu
items. Starbucks, Haagen-Dazs, and the
myriad of other food and drink purveyors
that rely on vanilla today are thus the
beneficiaries of a venerable and
pleasant addiction.
The vanilla bean has been prized
throughout its long history, not only
for its flavor, but also for its great
scarcity. Even today only about 2,200
metric tons of beans reach the world's
agricultural markets each year, and the
going price for the good stuff in 2004
was close to $275 a pound. Such precious
commodities breed violence, and Tim
Ecott, whose book recounts his travels
to the principal growing sites of the
vanilla orchid, needed the steel nerves
of a war correspondent to cover this
story.
Buyers for the major companies that
trade in vanilla travel to remote jungle
locations in Indonesia, Madagascar,
Mexico, and Papua New Guinea, chartering
private planes under aliases to confuse
competitors. They carry suitcases
stuffed with millions of dollars in cash
and visit wealthy growers whose
warehouses are surrounded by razor wire
and armed guards. Stories of extortion,
fraud, and murder in the vanilla trade
are as brutal as those told of diamond
dealers or heroin smugglers.
The vanilla orchid, its essence so easy
on the tongue, has not made things easy
for the grower. Although its vine
flourishes in many tropical climates,
the plant produces no seedpods unless it
is fertilized. In nature, that work is
done--but only rarely--by a species of
tropical bee native to Mexico and
Central America. The bee preserved the
Spanish domination of the vanilla trade
for many centuries. Early vanilla-lovers
from other countries, hoping to break
the monopoly, managed to transplant
cuttings to other parts of the globe,
but it was not until the middle of the
1800s that a slave named Edmond, on the
French colony of Reunion in the Indian
Ocean, devised a way to manually
inseminate the plants.
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Edmond's discovery laid the groundwork
for the global trade Ecott writes about,
but producing vanilla remains a tedious
and time consuming process. It takes
months for the seedpods to develop, and
months more to cure the seeds. Once the
vanilla beans reach the processing
factory, extracting the concentrated
flavoring can take weeks more, because
the dried beans must be steeped in
alcohol. Ecott's fascinating travelogue
makes it clear that the high price of
that little vial of natural vanilla
extract is, by any measure, a bargain. |
Modern chemists have learned to
synthesize the principal ingredient of
vanilla, and more than 90 percent of
vanilla-flavored foods now contain the
artificial stuff. But the real beans
contain an estimated 400 trace
components that greatly enhance the
flavor, and natural vanilla will surely
reign supreme for a long time among
lovers of good food.
LAURENCE A.
MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova
Story, is the W.K.T. Sahm professor of
physics at Gettysburg College in
Pennsylvania, and director of Project
CLEA, which produces widely used
simulation software for education in
astronomy.
COPYRIGHT Natural History Magazine,
Inc.& Gale Group
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