A Taste Of Vanilla
Four hundred miles east of Madagascar lies the island of Réunion which was uninhabited when the Portuguese first set foot on it in the early 16th century. Claimed by the French in 1642 its dense forests were soon cleared to make way for coffee and sugar plantations, worked initially by enslaved captives and then indentured Indian and Chinese workers. By the early 19th century 70% of the island’s population was made up of enslaved people, one of whom was Edmond, born in 1829, and living on a small plantation, Bellevue, above the town of Suzanne on the north coast.
Vanilla, a member of the orchid family, an evergreen vine indigenous to the tropical forests, which relies on the native bees to fertilise its big, blooming white flowers to create seedpods. The sensational taste of vanilla extracted from the seedpods took Europe by storm once it was introduced to the continent from the Spanish colonies in the new world. Particular favourites were a cold cocoa drink flavoured with vanilla, which the Aztecs called chocolati, and a vanilla-flavoured frozen custard, introduced to France by Catherine de Medici, which we would recognize as ice cream.
Keen to break the Spanish stranglehold over vanilla supply, the French planted vanilla in many of the tropical outposts of their empire, including Réunion, but while they often produced beautiful flowers, as was the case at Bellevue, the absence of natural pollinators meant that all attempts to produce beans failed. That is until 1841 when the by now 12-year-old Edmond made a chance discovery on the plantation of his master, Bellier-Beaumont.
Edmond peeled back the lip of the flower of a vanilla orchid and using a needle or a slither of wood nudged back the rostellum, the membrane separating the male anther from the female stigma, and pressed the two parts together. Several months later, Bellier-Beaumont wrote “walking with my faithful companion, I noticed on the only vanilla plant I still had, a well tied bean”, where the flower had been. “I was astonished and told him so. He said it was he who had pollinated the flower.”
Two or three days later he found another bean on the vine and got Edmond to show him how he had pollinated the plant. Today, the vast majority of the world’s commercially cultivated vanilla plants are hand-pollinated using le geste d’Edmond, as it is known in Réunion, a skilled grower able to pollinate around 1,500 flowers in a day. The process has yet to be mechanized and because it is so labour intensive it means that of the spices only saffron is more expensive than vanilla.
Edmond’s discovery was just what the French were looking for and it was quickly adopted amongst growers on Réunion. Then two growers, Ernest Loupy and David de Floris, discovered that they could accelerate the processing of fresh green vanilla beans by scalding them in hot water to prevent them from ripening further before drying rather than just leaving them out in the sun. Within 25 years Réunion had become the global leader in vanilla production.
