The word "vanilla" is often used as a synonym for bland or boring - but the University of Toronto's Eric Jennings says the reality is quite the opposite.
Jennings, a leading authority on modern French colonial history, digs into the history of the seemingly ubiquitous flavouring - used to sweeten ice cream, cakes, yogurt and more - in his new book Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean.
Eric Jennings (supplied image)
"This is at once the history of a commodity, but it's also a cultural history," says Jennings, chair of U of T's department of history in the Faculty of Arts & Science. "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, he says, vanilla is one of history's most expensive and popular flavourings, and was even once thought to possess aphrodisiacal properties. Recognized as the world's most appealing scent in blind smell-testing, it's also a staple in fragrances 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."
The vanilla orchid is native to Mexico, where it is pollinated by a local bee called 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.
Yet, 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 botanist Charles François Antoine Morren had actually cracked the pollination secret of vanilla planifolia years before, he was doing it under controlled laboratory conditions. Albius, by contrast, figured out how to do it by hand, rising to prominence as a speaker and teacher - and later securing 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."
Emphasizing the significance of Albius's achievement, Jennings says he learned just how difficult it is to pollinate vanilla when attempted to do it himself 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."
Vanilla is also notoriously intensive to harvest and prepare, and vanilla production is routinely dogged by accusations of worker exploitation, child labour, theft and violence on farms. 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 says. "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."
