Today about 75 percent of the world’s vanilla comes from Madagascar and Réunion. Vanilla plantations sprang up across the globe, from Madagascar to India, Tahiti, and Indonesia. The simple technique had far-reaching implications. Transplants of vanilla to tropical and presumably vanilla-friendly regions around the globe, however-lacking the proper bees-remained determinedly podless until 1841, when Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old slave boy on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, figured out how to hand-pollinate the vanilla blooms using a stick and a flip of the thumb. If pollination is successful, a fruit develops in the form of a 6-to-10-inch-long pod, filled with thousands of minuscule black seeds (the appealing specks in good-quality vanilla ice cream). Frankly, given its sexual proclivities and narrow window of opportunity, the very existence of vanilla seems like an evolutionary long shot. Each flower remains open for just 24 hours, after which, if not pollinated, it wilts, dies, and drops to the ground. These-in Mexico, vanilla’s native habitat-are pollinated by melipona bees and, occasionally, by hummingbirds. Vanilla grows as a clinging vine, reaching lengths of up to 300 feet, from which sprout pale greenish-yellow flowers, about four inches in diameter. Vanilla is the second most expensive spice in the world (after saffron) because its production is so labor-intensive. The problem with vanilla is that it’s pricey. Pemberton’s Coca-Cola, which went on sale in 1886, impressively advertised as an “esteemed Brain tonic and Intellectual Beverage.” Not only was it the established flavor of choice for ice cream, but it was an essential ingredient of soft drinks-among these Atlanta chemist John S. By the latter half of the century, the demand for vanilla skyrocketed. According to food historian Waverley Root, the first known vanilla recipe appears in the 1805 edition of Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, which suggests adding “vanelas” to chocolate the first American recipe-for vanilla ice cream-is found in Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife (1824). He was so thrilled with it that he copied down a recipe, now preserved in the Library of Congress. By the next century, the French were using vanilla to flavor ice cream-a treat discovered by Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s, when he lived in Paris as American Minister to France. Vanilla was thought of as nothing more than an additive for chocolate until the early 17th Century, when Hugh Morgan-a creative apothecary in the employ of Queen Elizabeth I-invented chocolate-free, all-vanilla-flavored sweetmeats. The Aztecs drank their chocolatl with a dash of vanilla, and Europeans, once they got used to the stuff (one appalled Spaniard described chocolate as “a drink for pigs”), followed suit. One source claims that it was introduced to western Europe by Hernán Cortés-though at the time it was eclipsed by his other American imports, which included jaguars, opossums, an armadillo, and an entire team of ballplayers equipped with bouncing rubber balls. The Aztecs acquired vanilla when they conquered the Totonacs in the 15th Century the Spanish, in turn, got it when they conquered the Aztecs. Vanilla is a native of South and Central America and the Caribbean and the first people to have cultivated it seem to have been the Totonacs of Mexico’s east coast. Vanilla is a member of the orchid family, a sprawling conglomeration of some 25,000 different species. The truth is, though, that plain vanilla is anything but dull. A plain-vanilla wardrobe lacks pizzazz plain-vanilla technologies lack bells and whistles plain-vanilla automobiles miss out on chrome, fins, and flashy hood ornaments and plain-vanilla music is the sort of soulless drone that afflicts us in elevators. Given our passion for vanilla, it seems peculiar that “plain vanilla” is the going synonym for anything basic, bland, or blah. On the other hand, the International Ice Cream Association, which should know, puts vanilla at the top of the charts as first choice of 29 percent of ice-cream eaters, feebly followed by chocolate (8.9 percent), butter pecan (5.3 percent), and strawberry (5.3 percent). There’s a little waffling here: one source claims that actually it’s Democrats who prefer vanilla, while Republicans go for chocolate and a Baskin-Robbins poll found that there’s a substantial contingent in the Southwest that shuns both in favor of mint chocolate chip. By and large, Americans seem to like vanilla ice cream better than chocolate.
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