When Vanilla Was Brown And How We Came To See It As White
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/03/23/291525991/when-vanilla-was-brown-and-how-we-came-to-see-it-as-white?utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=npr&utm_campaign=nprnews&utm_content=03232014
Click on link for full article, excerpts below:
Given its tumultuous history, that vanilla is now an analog for dull and white is pretty odd.
Because, you see, vanilla comes from the .
They first cultivated the beans and used them for medicinal purposes —
not for flavoring. The Totonacs had to pay tribute to the Aztecs in the
form of thousands and thousands of vanilla beans. And it was the Aztecs
who used vanilla beans for flavoring. They mixed them with other things —
like cacao. (Because, chocolate drank. Aka choclatl, aka xocolatl.) But it was the eventual Spanish conquest of the Aztecs that brought vanilla as a flavor to Europe and beyond.
So how did folks learn to cultivate the plants? Well, slavery.
The
year was 1841. Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old French-owned black slave
from the Bourbon Islands, figured out what other botanists had tried to
do for centuries. Albius discovered that the vanilla plant could be
pollinated by hand using a blade of grass or a swipe of a thumb. It was
effective and labor-intensive, but once folks figured out how to
pollinate the plants, vanilla as a flavor became more accessible.
His discovery prompted French botanist Jean Michel Claude Richard to the technique years earlier, and some of the French press would later claim that Albius was white. (
acknowledges that Albius was a black slave, and also says his master
had him study botany.) Albius was eventually freed when slavery was
abolished in 1848, and he died in poverty. But the hand-pollinating
technique he created is still used on vanilla plants today, which is one
of the reasons why pure vanilla flavor is still so expensive.
Given
its incredibly dark and fascinating history, it's kind of amazing that
of all things, vanilla has become a metaphor for blandness.
