Vanilla. The word “vanilla” has come to be a byword for the bland and predictable. “How was the big party?” “Boring – it was totally vanilla.” Yet there is nothing mundane about this most luxurious of spices.
All spices have exotic origins. Saffron comes from the stigma of a crocus flower. Cinnamon is the dried bark of a tree. Mace comes from the blood red veins around a nutmeg. But vanilla has the most exotic origin of all.
The so-called vanilla “bean” is no such thing. It is the cured, dried seed pod of an orchid native to Central America and the Caribbean. The vanilla plant is very different from orchids you might have grown at home. It’s a straggly vine, up to 15 metres in length, which hauls itself up the trunks of rainforest trees, into the canopy where it can reach the sun. Its flower is a ghostly pale green – not really corsage material. Unlike many orchids, whose flowers last for several weeks, vanilla flowers last just half a day.
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