"What frightful trouble you have taken about Vanilla; you really must not take an atom more; for the orchids are more play than real work"    

-Charles Darwin in letter to colleague William Hooker   

  As I am preparing for this year’s Orchid Mania exhibit  opening February 27, I wanted to share some history of one very interesting and perhaps most economically important orchid species, Vanilla planifolia. The vanilla orchid is peculiar because it grows like a vine. The fermented seedpods are the source of the flavoring vanillin.

        Vanilla and chocolate have a long history together and have been together long before the invention of ice cream.  One of the earliest record of the use of the vanilla bean dates back as far early 1400’s when vanilla beans along with cacao seeds, from which chocolate is derived, were part of tributes paid by the Totonacs and other Central American tribes to the Aztecs. The Aztecs, Mayans, and other Central American natives used vanilla almost exclusively to flavor and perfume a popular beverage prepared from cacao seeds. 

      In the early 1500’s, vanilla, along with its chocolate beverage, was introduced in Europe and became popular among the wealthy. It wasn’t until 1602 that Hugh Morgan, pharmacist to Queen Elizabeth I, suggested that vanilla could have other uses besides being a flavoring for chocolate. In 1789, Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassador to France, brought Vanilla to the U.S. from Paris along with a recipe for vanilla ice cream. His hand written recipe can be found in the Library of Congress.

          Many attempts were made to grow vanilla outside of Central America in the first three centuries after its discovery, but the orchids never bore fruit. In 1838, Charles Morren discovered that only bees of the genus Eulaema pollinated the flowers, and they could not survive outside of Mexico. Three years later a suitable method of hand pollination was discovered that allowed vanilla production to spread across the globe. In 1858, vanillin was isolated opening the way for the creation of artificial vanilla.

 Posted by Nate Tschaenn

Tags: , orchid, vanilla

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Nate Tschaenn, Orchid Mania, Tropical Plants, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.