Vanilla: A Brief History of the World's Favorite Flavor

A brief history of the world’s favorite flavor

- Lior Lev Sercarz

Like all fruits, vanilla begins with a flower: A single flower that opens up on only one day every year, and if you fail to pollinate it, that’s it. No vanilla bean.

The flat-leaved vanilla orchid (Vanilla planifolia) is a vine-like tropical plant with dark, leathery leaves that produces ornate, pale green flowers. Up until the mid-19th century, vanilla orchids were pollinated exclusively by a particular genus of bee in Mexico, called Melipona. Over the years, as demand rose, attempts were made to industrialize the pollination process, to no avail. Vanilla was stubborn.

All of this changed thanks to the ingenuity of a 12-year-old slave named Edmond Albius on the island of Bourbon, 500 miles east of Madagascar. In 1841, Albius discovered he could manually pollinate the orchid using a sliver of wood or a needle. And that’s how it’s still done today: painstakingly, flower by flower. After this delicate operation, the vanilla farmer must patiently wait for the pod to ripen and darken before it can be harvested. From there, the pod is washed, sorted, cured, and aged for at least a month, each stage of which risks failure. It could easily be a year after its initial harvest before a ready-to-use vanilla pod ends up in your kitchen.