In the United States, the scent of vanilla is believed to represent comfort and warmth. In France that same scent becomes the symbol femininity and elegance.
But one of the world’s most favourite flavourings and scents is rapidly escalating in price. A combination of poor harvests in two of the world’s main vanilla producing countries and opportunists stockpiling has already causing a surge on commodity markets. Wholesale prices rose 20 per cent in just two months.
Native to the humid tropical rain forests of southeastern Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean Islands and northern South America, commercially it is principally grown in Madagascar and Indonesia, although India and Mexico also normally produce large quantities. The latter two countries have unfortunately recently experienced low crops. Mexico’s in particular dropped a calamitous 90 per cent in the past year. But then everything tends to be unusual about this # – despite the description ‘vanilla sex’ for conventional or standard sex.
Technically, for instance, it is not really a # at all. True # yield essential oils. Vanilla does not. Nevertheless it is commonly regarded as a # so as such it had better remain to us, and one of the comparatively few to originate in the Western Hemisphere.
Vanilla planifolia was formerly known by the more appropriate name
V. fragrans until taxonomists stuck a nose in. It is the only member of the enormous orchid family – some 25,000 members and counting – to be raised for consumption as opposed to decoration. Unlike its ornamental cousins, it is a vigorous vine, regularly reaching 80 feet in length but said to attain 300. The two-inch greenish yellow flowers emerge from the leaf axils and are short-lived.
The name Vanilla comes from the Spanish
vainilla, a diminutive of
vaina, a pod. These contain what botanically are seeds but known commercially as ‘beans.’ Strangely, these have no flavour when harvested; the delicious scent arises during their curing or fermentation. Exactly how the Aztecs or possibly other Central American peoples discovered this is a mystery. But upon the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors in Mexico in 1520, they noticed that the beverage
chocolatl was flavoured with
tlilxochitl, ground black vanilla pods. It was taken back to Europe where in less than a century it became all the rage – and has remained so ever since.
Since it was so valued, attempts were made to produce the valued ‘beans’ elsewhere in the tropics. While the vines grew and flowered they failed to produce the desired pods. Eventually it was discovered that in its native habitat melipone bees and certain hummingbirds not present elsewhere pollinated the vanilla blooms.
Five years after a demonstration of hand pollination by Belgian botanist Charles Morren in 1836, a former slave on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion, Edmond Albius, invented a fast, effective way to achieve this artificially.
Today,
Vanilla planifolia is commonly propagated from four- to six-inch-long cuttings then grown on under extreme labour-intensive conditions to produce perhaps – if all goes well about – 120-pounds of dried, cured beans per acre. In Malaysia, researchers are attempting to clone
V. planifolia utilizing modern scientific techniques used successfully for many another crop. Frustratingly, though, as with so much about vanilla, it has remained beyond their laboratory skills.
So of course modern technology seeks substitutes. White rapper Vanilla Ice thinks, “charity is nice.” Unfortunately artificial vanilla is anything but. Commonly derived from lignin, a waste product produced in vast quantities as a waste product by the wood pulp industry, it is a wretched substitute for the real thing.
But let the last word on vanilla belong to Marc Gott, former director of Fannie Mae’s loan-serving department, explaining the company’s collapse, quoted in
Time magazine: “This system was designed for plain vanilla loans, and we were trying to push chocolate sundaes through the gears.” And we all know who got the gears . . .
