A twelve-year-old on Réunion cracked the secret that made vanilla global
Vanilla vines taken from Mexico grew happily in European hothouses and French colonies but refused to bear pods. In 1841 Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion, found a quick way to pollinate the flowers by hand. Growers worldwide still use his technique, and it turned vanilla into a global crop.
The spice comes from the pods of an orchid, chiefly Vanilla planifolia. Each flower carries both male and female parts, but a flap of tissue called the rostellum keeps them apart, and one flower yields just one pod. Outside Mexico, natural pollinators such as Eulaema orchid bees were absent. Belgian botanist Charles Morren managed artificial pollination in 1837, yet his method cost too much to use. Albius's approach, lifting the membrane with a sliver of bamboo, was simple enough for farm workers. A French botanist later claimed prior credit, but Albius came to be recognised as the real discoverer.
The Totonac people of Veracruz cultivated vanilla by at least 1185, using it in temple fragrance, amulets and food. After the Aztecs conquered them in 1427 they blended it with cocoa in xocolatl, likely to soften cacao's bitterness in a land without sugar. Hernán Cortés brought vanilla and chocolate to Europe in the 1520s. An apothecary to Elizabeth I made sweets flavoured with vanilla alone, and by the eighteenth century the French were putting it in ice cream.
Weight for weight, only saffron costs more, because growing the pods takes so much handwork. Madagascar and Indonesia now grow two-thirds of the supply. Prices swing wildly: after a price cartel dating from 1930 collapsed in the mid-1980s they fell 70 percent, then cyclones pushed them to 500 dollars a kilogram in 2004 and again in 2017. About 95 percent of vanilla-flavoured products use vanillin made from lignin instead.
Bourbon vanilla has nothing to do with whiskey; the name comes from Île Bourbon, the old name of Réunion.
Source: Vanilla
