The word “vanilla” is often used as a synonym for bland or boring. But Eric Jennings shows that it’s quite the opposite in his new book Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean.
“This is at once the history of a commodity, but it’s also a cultural history,” says Jennings, chair of the Department of History and a leading authority on modern French colonial history. “And I was very interested in several things on the cultural history side — one was how vanilla has come to connote bland, which turns out to be much more true in North America than other parts of the world.”
In fact, vanilla is one of the most expensive and popular flavourings in history.
Widely used to sweeten ice cream, cakes, yogurt and much more, the spice was once thought to possess aphrodisiacal properties. Recognized as the world’s most appealing scent in blind smell-testing, it’s a staple in fragrance: worn by cultural icons from Marie Antoinette to Michelle Obama.
Jennings first became interested in vanilla over 20 years ago when he was conducting PhD research in Madagascar, where roughly 80 per cent of the world’s vanilla is now produced.
“I was working in the capital, Antananarivo,” he says, “and I came to understand the weight of vanilla on the country’s economy. I would leave the archives and immediately be surrounded by hawkers trying to sell me vanilla. I became fascinated as to how Madagascar became the world’s top producer of the substance, which wasn’t even from there originally.”
As Jennings explains, the vanilla orchid is native to Mexico, where it is pollinated by a local bee called the Melipona. The beans were used to help flavour a drink called chocolatl, favoured by the Totonac people and later the Aztecs. European colonial powers later transported vanilla across the ocean and it ultimately made its way to Madagascar.
Absent the Melipona bee, pollinating the flower seemed an impossible task. But on the nearby island of Réunion, an enslaved teenage boy named Edmond Albius managed to do so in 1841.
Jennings points out that while Belgian scientist Charles Morren had actually cracked the pollination secret of vanilla planifolia years before, he was doing it under laboratory conditions. Albius figured out how to do it by hand, leading to his short-lived fame as a speaker and teacher: and later, his place in history.
“You could just imagine how others reacted — other enslaved people, but also free people of colour,” Jennings says. “Also, botanists, settlers and plantation owners. How did this teenage botanist, because he really was a botanist, know how to do this, as well as knowing the Latin names for plants and their workings? In his presentations to experts, he subverted hierarchies.”
Albius’s achievement was truly significant — the vanilla orchid is notoriously difficult to pollinate. Jennings himself attempted to do so in Polynesia.
“It’s really delicate stuff,” he says, describing the dexterity required for hand-pollination. “And if you’re successful, nine months later you have a vanilla pod. But if you miss that moment of flowering, the flowers only really last a morning and then they fade.”
In fact, vanilla production is not only difficult and expensive, but routinely dogged by accusations of worker exploitation, child labour, theft and violence on farms. It’s notoriously intensive to harvest and prepare. So it’s not surprising that most vanilla consumed around the world is artificial.
After a French scientist isolated the vanillin molecule in the 19th century, it was widely produced synthetically. Jennings says that today, vanillin is produced from sources as varied as wood pulp and cow dung. On a carton of ice cream, “what is called ‘natural’ vanilla flavour can mean absolutely anything,” he says.
“And so I say in the book, if you’re really keen to get the real stuff, you’re better off buying vanilla beans, gently slicing the pod, removing the inside and using it for ice cream or whatever it is that you’re making. But then the question becomes, does it matter? Nine out of 10 people can’t tell the difference.”
Even so, Jennings took his sweet time nudging a vanilla orchid toward pollination. Did his efforts bear fruit, or something close to it?
“One of my contacts told me I was successful on the fourth attempt, but he might have been being generous,” Jennings laughs. “In the end my experiments now serve as car fresheners, because they failed as edible vanilla. I might be an expert in the history of vanilla — but I’m not an expert at producing it.”