VANILLA

The fascinating and wide ranging history of vanilla from the sixteenth century to today Vanilla is one of the most expensive of flavorings so valuable that it was smuggled or stolen by pirates in the early days and yet it is everywhere It is a key ingredient in dishes ranging from crème brûlée to Japanese purin It is the quintessential ice cream flavor in the United States Eric T Jennings explains how the world s only edible orchid originally endemic to Central America became embedded in the international culinary and cultural landscape In tracing vanilla s rise Jennings describes how in the 1840s an enslaved boy named Edmond Albius discovered a way to pollinate vanilla orchids with a toothpick or needle an ingenious process that is still in use This method transformed the vanilla sector by enabling the plant to be grown outside of its natural range Jennings also looks at how the vanilla craze led to the search for now pervasive substitutes and how a vanilla lobby has fought back He further unravels how vanilla the world s most expensive crop and once considered its most refined fragrance came to mean bland This tale of botany production techniques consumption habits and colonial rivalry connects the Atlantic Indian and Pacific Oceans revealing ho