Hernán Cortés reached the court of Montezuma, Aztec king, in 1519. This was a red letter day in early modern history: it's one of the main reasons Spanish is spoken in Mexico, and as the gold began to jingle in the Spanish coffers, it cemented a new and hardcore European imperialism. Historians quibble over certain details, but Montezuma – who may have believed Cortés to be the emissary of an Aztec snake god – welcomed the conquistador with extraordinary fealty, garlanding him with flowers from his own gardens, inviting him into his palace and, of course, plying him with lunch.
Among the dishes the explorer-slash-pillager tasted was a frothy black drink chilled with snow and sweetened with honey. It was liquid chocolate, which Cortés had already encountered. But the Aztec cooks had flavoured it with a strange and seductive new spice, which the Spanish later called "vainilla", meaning "little pod" or sheath (the word is closely related to "vagina"). Whatever his vaingloriousness, his treachery and cruelty, Cortés can be thanked for bringing to Europe what the people of the American isthmus had been cultivating for at least 500 years.
The spice trickled slowly into Europe. By the time she died in 1603 Elizabeth I had found a taste for it, and her chefs were probably the first to pair vanilla with a sweetened almond purée, an early marzipan. When Maria Theresa married the Sun King Louis XIV in 1660 she brought her Spanish chef to France, and vanilla soon spread to the banquets of European nobility.
At first, it seemed impossible to cultivate vanilla outside Mexico. The first cuttings shipped to the Old World didn't sprout at all, and those that grew elsewhere in the tropics were invariably infertile. Not until the 1830s did the Belgian botanist Charles Morren realise that a specific stingless Mexican bee, the melipona, was responsible for pollinating the majority of vanilla flowers, and around the same time as him one Neumann in the Museum of Paris developed a cumbersome way to pollinate them by hand. The French planted vanilla on their Indian Ocean colony Réunion, but production was sluggish and unstable.
In 1841, a 12-year-old Réunion slave named Edmond Albius discovered a technique to hand-pollinate vanilla using a pointed stick or blade of grass. Vanilla growers everywhere still use his method, as almost all vanilla is pollinated by hand. Despite the pelf he brought his colonial overlords, Albius never earned a centime for his discovery, and he died destitute in 1880.
Vanilla, as every pub quizzee knows, comes from an orchid. The spice is both expensive and subject to extraordinary price fluctuations: between 2003 and 2010 the global market yo-yoed between $25 and $500 a kilo. Not only is it a temperamental plant, growing it is a gigantic faff. Each flower opens for an eight-hour window which is your only chance to pollinate it. Then you wait several weeks for the pods to appear, lengthen and ripen, before you cut them off the plant and quickly kill them to halt growth. You then shift the pods between hot sunlight and overnight swaddlings in cloth for several weeks, before air-drying them for up to six months. This wearisome process helps them to develop vanillin, the main compound that brings the pods their whimperingly seductive scent.
The best vanilla pods have little crystals of vanillin on their slender stems and retain a little bend; old pods are brittle and easily snapped. One esoteric piece of food snobbery I wasn't aware of is that gourmets insist on Mexican vanilla, which tends to be aged for longer – though it's hard to get hold of this outside the US. Indian Ocean islands including Madagascar and Réunion make Bourbon vanilla, the kind we're most familiar with in this country. Tahitian vanilla, rarest of all, is said to be the fruitiest.
Almost all "vanilla" sold in the west is a synthetic chemical derived from wood pulp in paper milling, and labelled as "vanilla flavouring" or suchlike on shop shelves. True vanilla gains its thickly fuggy fragrance from over 200 individual compounds, while fake vanilla contains just one – albeit the most important – vanillin. In America, according to Harold McGee, 90% of all "vanilla" comes from the lab and the factory: in France it's just 50%. The bulk goes into ice cream, of course, as well as chocolate-making.
Those who complain they find vanilla boring are unlikely to have tasted the real thing in a while. There is simply nothing not to like about true vanilla: it lifts anything cream-based or custardy without compromising its richness. Sticking a used, rinsed, dried pod in a jar of sugar is a good way to make it go further, and a couple of new pods steeped for a few weeks in a bottle of vodka will bring the drink an unsickly, unctuous body. A judicious soupçon of vanilla is lovely in a fish soup, and that pioneer of nouvelle cuisine Alain Senderens was perhaps the first to pair it with lobster. (A number of chefs have followed ineptly in his footsteps, as I discovered to my horror in Barcelona.) I've recently become something of an evangelist for vanilla paste, which is cheaper by weight than the naked pods and miles better than extract.
So familiar and instinctively lovable is vanilla that its name has become a byword for the ordinary, safe and predictable. But if you haven't made proper vanilla ice cream for a while I recommend it.
