The hot city fell behind me as the traffic picked up speed along the Boulevard Lancastel heading east. Once past the tip of the island the road straightened out, running parallel to the old railway line which once carried thousands of tonnes of sugar to the port. To my right, office buildings covered in hoardings for French cellular phones reared up on the outskirts of the city and to my left, the surface of the dark blue sea lay dimpled and glittering in the morning light.
Past Roland Garros airport and onto the eastbound N2 highway the landscape opened out depriving me of the sight of the water as it cut inland. Great rolling fields of tall sugar cane spread out on either side of the motorway, and the sign to Sainte Suzanne drew me onto a promontory just where the curve of the coastline begins to head due south. I followed the signs for the centre of town, and found a small square dominated by a whitewashed church. Close by was a bus stop, and behind it the tourist information office. Inside, there were two sullen youths, an extremely thin boy wearing a football shirt and a chubby girl with rather bad acne. Her jeans were skin tight and his shirt was made of some type of shiny nylon which shimmered when he moved. Neither garment seemed a good choice for the steamy heat. They ignored my presence, barely interrupting their conversation as I photographed a civic shield on the wall above their heads. Hic Vanillam Albius Fecundavit. ‘Here Albius fertilised Vanilla’, said the motto on the scroll beneath the shield. I found this rather exciting, and asked if they could tell me about the monument to the man himself. The fat girl shook her head, looking at the skinny boy for help. She looked slightly amazed when he jabbed a finger onto the map affixed to the wall and pointed to a small road inland labelled D63. “Up here,” he said. “Just follow the road and you will see it.”
The road he indicated seemed to peter out at Belle Vue, the modernised name of Bellier-Beaumont’s original plantation. I knew from the archives that the original property no longer existed, but its name had remained as a general term for the area.
“Do you have any more information about Edmond Albius, and his connections with Sainte Suzanne?”
“No.”
“Do you know where the town’s old poor-house was situated?”
“No.” The girl let out a long sigh. “We don’t get tourists here.”
“But, there is a lighthouse,” the boy volunteered. “Built in 1845.”
The lighthouse was the best the town could offer in the way of sights. It was very much a standard lighthouse: tall round stone column with glass domed lantern on top. A plaque on the wall told me that on a clear night its light could be seen from eighteen miles offshore, and that before it was built the rocks at Sainte Suzanne had claimed a lot of ships. I left the town and crossed under the motorway to find the small road the skinny boy had shown me on the map. It took me inland, due south of the town and began to climb through sugar cane rising ten or twelve feet high and blocking the view to left and right. For several miles there were no houses, and no other traffic.
As the road climbed upwards I caught sight of the mountains in the distance, the irregular rim of the Cirque de Salazie like a fortress wall blocking access to the interior. The land fell away now, sloping back towards the sea and freeing me from the suffocating press of the sugar fields. I spotted a lone harrier, the type they call papangue, soaring on thermals high above the fields, a strong dark bird with a three-foot wingspan searching the cane for mice. A small church with a red zinc roof and a breezeblock house stood on a sharp bend in the road. I stopped to take my bearings, parking a few yards in front of a bus stop. There was a bench for passengers to use and I walked towards it, intending to study my map. The sign said the stop was part of the Vanilla Line: and the name of the bus stop was Albius. The sign had a small picture of a vanilla orchid in one corner. And there, tucked under a shade-tree was the monument to Edmond.
A square of cement had been laid out as a base, and in flaking green capitals it proclaimed “Homage to Edmond Albius 1829–1880”. In the centre of the cement stood a crude model of his head. Around the base of his neck Edmond wore a painted necklace of vanilla vine. A misshapen Afro coiffure, beetling brows and protruding eyes made him look like a caricature of a Black and White Minstrel. The whole effect was like a giant novelty birthday cake.
A metal sign behind the monument said that the head had been erected in 1980 at the behest of the Mayor of Sainte Suzanne. I could only imagine it had been modelled by children as part of a school project.
I sat down at the bus stop to take in the details of the scene. The harrier was stooping over the cane field and I watched it for several minutes before it was carried downwind on its hunt. After a time two fair-skinned boys in threadbare denim shorts emerged soundlessly from the cane close to where I was sitting. One of them carried some kind of animal trap over his shoulder, and a few seconds after them came a pack of four stringy hunting dogs. The boys nodded at me in greeting and sloped off down a path close to the bus stop, leaving me alone with Edmond again. A little way uphill there was a wide grass verge with a small pond and a grove of banana trees with views of the mountains in one direction and to the Indian Ocean in the other. The air smelt deliciously fresh, wiped clean by its long journey across the ocean. The afternoon sun caught the sugarcane and drew a dozen shades of green within the fronds. A light breeze came up, and made them whisper. It is a peaceful spot, at least.
When the other planters came in their carriages to Belle-vue to watch Edmond pollinate his vanilla orchids they included Sarrazin de Floris from nearby Saint André. The De Floris name has been linked to the little Mexican flower ever since, and the family still grow some high grade vanilla. Surrounded by a cluster of ugly modern buildings in the centre of town they own a small wooden creole-style house and plantation called Maison de la Vanille. Tourists can visit the grounds and watch the curing process that produces the finest quality Vanille Bourbon.
On my way back to town, I stopped at St. André, where Alain de Floris offered me tea made with lemon grass for refreshment in the garden beside the neat wooden house. I had been to the plantation several times on successive visits to Réunion, but this time I wanted to ask him about the lack of a decent memorial to Edmond.
“You know how these things are,” he shrugged. “Politics.”
“Wouldn’t it be good politics to commemorate a man like Albius?” I asked. De Floris shook his head.
“I’m not a politician. I don’t have anything to do with such things. And a lot of the past is difficult in Réunion.”
For reasons I couldn’t decipher, he also seemed reluctant to discuss his family’s connections with vanilla, perhaps disavowing their links with the past. “Things have changed, you know. Our family’s name is still associated with vanilla here but we don’t live by it now. Compared to the old days production is small and we hardly export anything, even though the quality is still good. We sell it locally, but remember in 1928 the island sent over a hundred tonnes to Europe, and even after the Second World War seventy to eighty tonnes was a good year. But no-one needs to grow vanilla on the island now,” de Floris explained. “People don’t want to work in the fields, and they don’t need to. And, in any case, growing and curing vanilla is not so easy, it takes a lot of practice.”
There was a De Floris aboard Marchand’s ship when the first vanilla plants arrived from Paris in 1822. Thirty years later, thanks to Edmond Albius’s newly discovered technique, he was growing commercially productive vines at Saint André. In collaboration with another eminent resident of the town, a lawyer named Ernest Loupy, they began experimenting with a new method of blanching the vanilla beans before they were dried. Traditionally, the Mexican vanilla growers had simply relied on the sun to cure the fruit, but the Loupy—De Floris method was to use hot water to speed up the process. By experimenting they discovered that dipping the beans for two to three minutes in water that was between sixty and seventy degrees Centigrade, they would start to turn brown almost immediately. It was another important step on the road to producing the perfect Bourbon bean.
After tea, Alain de Floris left me to explore the grounds. This was not the season for vanilla flowers, but there were wooden trays heaped with dark brown pods drying on the grass close to the long white-washed stone building where the vanilla was cured. The contents of the trays glistened with their familiar oily sheen, the moist signal that the enzymes inside the pods were doing their work. As I stepped into the curing shed, I inhaled the rich sweet scent of Bourbon vanilla. This is what vanilla from Réunion, Madagascar and the Comoros is famous for: the sweet deep haylike notes that we associate with desserts and ice-cream.
Inside the shed the air felt cool and dry, with dozens more wooden trays each about three feet long and two feet wide laid out in neat rows on the cement floor. Tall wooden shutters along one wall of the shed had been opened to the breeze, while high doors led out onto the verandah on the other. At the far end there was a simple wooden trestle table, where a man in a straw hat sat sorting loose vanilla beans from a wicker basket at his side. His name was Jean-Patric Baraka and he told me that he was a ‘matchmaker’, one of the men who fertilise the vanilla orchids by hand between October and December, the flowering season. His features were small and neat, like his fingers, which continually dipped into the basket of pods as we spoke. Each bean was held flat against a ruler affixed to the surface of the old table, and then placed in a compartmentalised tray, something like an old sorting box for mail with pigeonholes marked out with numbers. Each number related to the length of the beans it contained. According to the tray, the maximum length could be twenty-four centimetres, though Jean-Patric said fifteen or sixteen was considered good. He spoke in heavily accented creole, and shyly told me he was happiest speaking to people like me, foreigners who didn’t mind that his French was imperfect. “We are in the same boat,” I replied, and his features crinkled into a broad smile.
When Jean-Patric had enough beans in a compartment he would take them and sort them into bundles of one hundred, tying them tightly with cord. These neat bundles would then be placed inside sturdy wooden chests at one end of the drying room and locked tight with a brass padlock.
“This is the best vanilla in the world,” Jean-Patric explained proudly. “You can keep it in a jar for twenty years and it will be as good as new when you want to use it.”
I picked up one of the biggest pods and ran its length between my fingers. Fully ten inches long, plump, sensual and full of aroma, it was slightly greasy to the touch. Like oiled leather, and almost black in colour, it bore no blemishes or scratches. It was the finest quality I had ever seen.
In the nineteenth century, French growers developed a large vocabulary to cover the different grades of bean they produced. In the same way that people joke that Eskimos have a dozen words for snow, the vanilla dealers have refined the categorisation of their beans into an art. First they would break down the beans into first, second or third grade and fourth grade known simply as ‘ordinary’. Size, plumpness, and even how straight the beans are all have an effect upon what the buyers will pay. Then they would subdivide those categories according to the appearance of the beans, even though minute cosmetic details might have no relevance to their flavour component. It resulted in a bewildering array of sub-categories relating to the different blemishes the fruits could display. Beans could be described as ‘scratched’, ‘rubbed’, ‘stained’, ‘dry’, ‘split’, ‘bitten’ (by an insect) and ‘pitted’. Beans might also be ‘pock-marked’ or ‘musty’, and even ‘snailed’ (escargotée) if they showed a fine tracery of lines resembling the tracks of a tiny mollusc. Another category of vanilla is known as givré, from the French word for rime, or hoar frost. The term describes the effect produced at a late stage of fermentation, where the vanilla beans sprout fine needle shaped hairs of crystallised vanillin—one of the principle chemicals that produce its flavour. Such beans are amongst the most valuable in the world, bearing on their skin the evidence that they will have a strong flavour, and that they have been left to mature for at least eight months.
“Look,” Jean-Patric took the pod from my hand and deftly tied a knot in it. “It doesn’t split or tear. That shows it’s perfectly cured.”
The wooden chests where the bundles were being packed could each hold a hundred and fifty kilograms of the very best black Bourbon beans. Filled with gourmet grade beans the boxes could be worth seventy-five thousand dollars. “Do you lock these chests up at night? I asked.
Jean-Patric nodded vigorously. “Oh yes, le patron is very careful. And you see, each box has a brass padlock too.”
I was curious to know if Jean-Patric understood why the gourmet grade beans were so valuable. “Because of the work involved,” he explained calmly. “I am over forty years old, but I am the youngest of the matchmakers, it is a dying craft. The young people here are not interested in doing such work. You know,” he lowered his voice as though divulging a secret. “Each bean will be handled perhaps twenty-five times before it reaches the shops. And there are so many steps along the way. There is the fertilisation, the picking, then the killing in the hot water. Then we must wrap the beans for twelve hours to sweat. This is where it turns brown, but all the time you have to watch it like a small child. You see, what with the pollinating, the growing and then the curing—it is just like making a baby!”
After dipping, and then sweating for twelve hours, Jean-Patric explained that the beans are laid out in the sun to dry again, a process that has to be carefully monitored—too much sun will dry them too rapidly, while too little will increase the chance of mould. Then they must be brought inside to dry in the shade for a month, being sorted and checked daily for moisture content and health. The French call this the triage, just like the term for sorting and prioritising casualties on a battlefield. Before the beans can be measured and bundled they need to go into drying boxes for another eight months, and all the while they are shrinking as they lose their original moisture, so that five or six kilograms of green beans will weigh just one kilogram when dried. The amount of volume lost is also something that depends on the skill of the curer, and trying to speed up or slow down the process can spoil the whole crop. Beans are sometimes massaged to keep them straight as they dry out, since a curved bean will be less valuable. By the time the finished beans are shipped to the brokers in the USA or Europe it will have been eighteen or nineteen months since they first began growing on the vine.
Not all of Réunion’s vanilla growers are as steeped in the history of the plant as the De Floris family. On the south eastern most corner of the island the coastal road runs directly beneath the slopes of Piton de la Fournaise, one of the world’s most active volcanoes. It keeps most people away from farming the verdant soil north of the town of St. Philippe. They call this the Scorched Land, where molten lava has been ejected from the furnace eight thousand feet above, cutting a swathe through the coastal road more than once in recent years. The pumice-strewn scree is a black scar on the island’s flank. This is still the windy coast, and savage seas beat against the rocks sending spouts of spray up over the road in places. The combination of the elements, and the rocky cliffs beset by the vast southern ocean give this part of Réunion a wild, untamed feel.
One day, not far from St. Philippe, with hard rain sweeping in form the east and darkening the skies ahead of me, I spotted a small hand-painted sign at the edge of the road. It was advertising vanilla for sale, and it belonged to a bone-thin man with large marmoset eyes called Aimé Leichnig, whose tiny garage was also his vanilla workshop. We stood in the doorway watching the rain fall and he told me that his grandfather had taught him how to cure vanilla. He used the plant to make perfumes as well, and the garage had been laid out as a miniature laboratory. Vanilla perfumed toiletries and liqueurs were on display in modest quantities. In common with other farmers at this end of the island he grew his vines in the forest, using wild natural supporting plants rather than planting them in neat artificial rows. The vanilla pods he produced were not as fine as those at the De Floris house, but Aimé Leichnig handled them with love. I wondered if he could earn a good living at his small-scale business. He shook his head slowly, as if he were explaining something to a fool. “Vanilla is part of me. This is simply what I must do, I can’t help it.”
Leichnig’s words reminded me of something an American vanilla broker once said to me. “Be careful”, he warned. “This little plant is addictive. If you start following it around the world it’ll get a grip on you and it won’t let go.”
I have met obsession and passion more than once on my journey. Although they guard their commercial secrets well, vanilla growers, buyers and dealers are usually happy to talk about their arcane trade. Dealing in vanilla is an intensive occupation. Thanks to the volatility of the world market, the international buyers need to be extremely vigilant, always on the alert for news that might affect next season’s price. They also need to juggle the different seasons in their heads—remembering that, for example, in Mexico the vines will flower between March and May, while in Madagascar they flower from October to January, and in Tahiti between July and October. Sometimes there will be two flowering seasons in each location, producing a second crop. In Madagascar the harvest will be in mid-June through to August, while in Indonesia it will run from March until July. And while each region has a different flowering season, there are other variables to consider. In Indonesia the beans will be picked after only three or four months on the vine, as opposed to the ideal eight or nine months growth in the Indian Ocean. The strength of the flowering season will also effect how many kilograms of dried beans are likely to be available after curing, and the experienced traders must base their advance prices on estimates of supply and demand. Frequent visits to the producing countries are a necessity. At a dinner in Paris one evening the wife of a broker confided: “He gets that look on his face sometimes. I could be telling him I want a divorce, but I know I’m wasting my breath—he’s not really listening because he’s off in his vanilla world.”
In Southern California there is a woman who calls herself ‘The Vanilla Queen’. She signs her letters ‘VQ’, and has been known to attend industrial food fairs wearing her Vanilla Queen regalia. In a white dress from Mexico and with a garland of woven vanilla in her hair, she carries a ‘vanilla wand’ with which she conveys her blessings. Her name is Patricia Rain, and she is a passionate advocate of the plant and its uses, especially in cooking.
Behind her Vanilla Queen façade, Patricia is an anthropologist and a successful cookbook author. Some years ago, and much to the annoyance of some of the larger vanilla dealers she had the foresight to register her own website address as vanilla.com. The website informs visitors that it is “an interactive e-commerce business dedicated to vanilla information and education as well as the sale of vanilla and vanilla value-added products.” In addition the Vanilla Queen reveals that the problems of deforestation in the tropics are one factor in promoting harmful climate change. As part of her mission, the VQ wants to encourage people to buy “natural, consciously grown products to provide more economic opportunities for people living in the tropical band on either side of our Equator”. This may in turn help to slow down the environmental degradation caused by poor agricultural practices, especially the disastrous effects of clear-cutting the forests to create grazing land for cattle. The website also states that the “Vanilla Company has a mission to further the expanding renaissance of vanilla.”
While on a visit to Los Angeles, I took the opportunity to fly up to San José for an audience with the VQ. The scenic drive over the hills through thick pine forests to the seaside town of Santa Cruz put me in a suitably mellow frame of mind. It is a surfers’ town, and has a large number of resident artists, though the ambience is changing as the creative community is gradually being displaced by computer specialists spilling out from nearby Silicon Valley. Although we had never met, Patricia welcomed me with a Californian hug and led me into her small neat house, ushering me into the dining room where there was a table laid with gleaming china and polished cutlery. There were also plates of sliced Californian peaches, raspberries and strawberries all freshly picked from her garden. Within a few minutes, Patricia had produced tea and warm vanilla scones from the kitchen.
“I just had to bake you something that an English person would enjoy!” she enthused. The house smelt of vanilla, although Patricia confessed that the scones had been cooked with a ready-made mix from the supermarket. “I’m sorry, I’ve just been so busy with one thing and another, I meant to mix up my own recipe but there just wasn’t time.”
After tea, and the very tasty scones, Patricia brought out her photograph albums and showed me her pictures of Mexico, describing her own journey to the vanilla growing regions and her affection for the people she met there. “I suppose I’m just an old hippie,” she laughed. “But I fell in love with Mexico and the farmers down there. Something has to be done to help them get a better price for their vanilla—you know they have an absolutely fabulous product but it’s so difficult for them to get organised and market it properly.”
Patricia sells vanilla, mostly through her Internet based business, but she also has a heartfelt desire to somehow educate the Mexican farmers and the beneficiadores who buy the green beans for curing. Eventually, she hopes that a fairer relationship between the two can be established. “It’s so, so difficult,” she sighed. “But we have to try. I’ve written to President Fox several times to try to get him interested in helping the vanilla growers. But,” she shook her head, with what seemed like genuine disbelief, “he hasn’t yet replied.”
All of the big vanilla dealers know the Vanilla Queen, and some of them are wary of her socially responsible attitude to vanilla buying and her campaign to get the farmers a better deal. One of the biggest buyers told me the Vanilla Queen made him nervous because she claimed she could see that he possessed a “very violet aura.” Some vanilla dealers are more prosaic in their doubts; they say they fear the VQ’s social mission will push up the price of natural vanilla by giving the farmers too much control of their own crop.
As we talked, Patricia took me into her vanilla store-room and showed me some of her products. Somehow, I was soon possessed of the knowledge that in true Californian tradition Patricia had been married three times, and I knew what had led to each of her divorces. The details of her life came spilling out as she led me around the store, pointing out soaps and candles, preserves and potions, all scented with vanilla. And there were boxes of beans.
“These are Mexican, smell them. Aren’t they wonderful? Now, here are some of the Tahitian—do you get the floral aroma—it’s magical isn’t it?”
I plucked up the courage to ask Patricia about her Vanilla Queen regalia. “Oh, don’t say you’ve heard about that! Maybe the wand wasn’t such a wise idea,” she laughed loudly, colouring slightly. “But I don’t mind what people say, the fact is I get noticed and it’s just a bit of fun. We need more fun in the world, don’t you agree?”
Late that evening I returned to Los Angeles. Somewhat unexpectedly, and uncharacteristically, the friend I was staying with had driven to the airport to meet me in person. “I had a phone call from a lady called Patricia,” he explained sheepishly. “She told me that it wouldn’t be kind to let you get a taxi into town on your own. So here I am.”