Following Edmond’s discovery, the manual technique for fertilising vanilla orchids spread slowly but steadily from Réunion to the neighbouring Indian Ocean islands. By 1866 it was being grown in Seychelles and Mauritius, and by 1870 it had reached several areas of the Great Red Island, Madagascar. Like Réunion, these Indian Ocean islands (even those controlled by the British) had a stock of French speaking planters whose livelihoods were threatened by the diversion of shipping through the Suez Canal. Fortunately, many of them would have vanilla beans to sustain them. By the late nineteenth century eighty percent of the thirty-tonnes of vanilla reaching Europe each year came from the French colonies. Planters in the Congo tried growing it, as did the British in India and Ceylon, with even the U.S. Department of Agriculture showing an interest in developing plantations in their newly annexed territories of Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. In most cases these countries would eventually abandon vanilla cultivation as too labour intensive when compared to other crops. However, thanks to the techniques perfected on Réunion, growing and pollinating vanilla orchids under suitable tropical conditions was no longer a great mystery. As far as commercial supplies of the luscious beans were concerned, the work of the Mexican orchid bees in allowing the vines to bear fruit had been entirely displaced by human activity.
In the south west Indian Ocean getting the vanilla vines to grow from cuttings was not a problem. The easiest means of establishing a vanilla plantation was simply to obtain some slips—about two feet long—from an established vine, and transplant them. The plants were, after all, robust enough to survive long sea voyages. As they grow, the vines need to be supported on a tutor, and any of several dozen species of trees and shrubs will do, including varieties of pine like Casuarina and shrubs like the Barbados nut which will not grow too tall. The vine will then send out aerial roots of its own which help it cling fast to its support. Once established, a mature vine sends down stems which hang downwards, eventually reaching the ground and producing roots for a new stage of growth. Early planters knew that cuttings needed to be transplanted at the end of the dry season and the base of the plants had to be given plenty of mulch. Vanilla likes moist heat, a hilly well drained site and just the right amount of sunshine and shade. The cannot tolerate temperatures lower than about 6°C, and prefer the temperature range between 21°-32°C. They also need as much as three thousand millimetres of rain, fairly evenly distributed throughout the seasons. In the SAVA region of Madagascar, the vines get exactly what they need.
In a good year, Madagascar produces more than half of all the world’s natural vanilla, approximately twelve-hundred of the two thousand tonnes of beans available to importing countries. By the beginning of the twentieth century the pattern for modern day vanilla production was well established. The amount grown and cured by Madagascar outstripped Mexico, Réunion, Comoros and Tahiti several fold. No plant was as widely used in confectionery and perfume as vanilla. In part, the demand for natural vanilla in Europe and the USA was driven by the industrialisation of the food industry, and the burgeoning market for processed foods and an increasing appetite for small luxuries, especially ice cream.
From early beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century, commercial ice cream production increased rapidly alongside improvements in technology, such as steam power, mechanical refrigeration, electrical motors and new freezing processes. In America in particular, it is fair to say that ice cream acquired a position of cultural prominence. Not only did Thomas Jefferson expend great effort to obtain his supply of vanilla ‘batons’ from Paris, but according to household records his predecessor, George Washington, spent more than two hundred dollars on ice cream for official entertaining during the summer of 1790. The nation credits Nancy Johnson, from Philadelphia, with the first patent for a successful hand-cranked ice cream freezer in 1846. Until her invention, making ice cream was extremely physically laborious, a task best left to servants. A mixture of cream, sugar, eggs, salt and vanilla had to be agitated by hand with a wooden spoon in a tin bowl, surrounded by ice. Johnson’s machine made the process faster, and the mixture smoother. Inside a large tin with a removable lid, she adapted an S-shaped ‘dasher’ that scraped the sides of the container as it churned, preventing large ice crystals from forming and ruining the result. Johnson’s ice cream churn cost three dollars, cheap enough for most middle class households to afford. By 1877 more than seventy improvements were made on the design of the original churn, speeding up the process. By 1878 ice cream was being shipped all over the country and it could be stored in ice cellars for several months.
In 1851, Jacob Fussell, a milk dealer in Baltimore, converted his milk plant into the first ice cream plant in the United States. By the end of the century, the ice cream parlour was a feature in even the smallest of towns. Americans also claim the invention of the ice cream cone as their own—in 1896. Other ice cream achievements included ice cream sodas (1874), ice cream Sundaes (1881), Eskimo Pies (1920) and Popsickles (1923).
When America opened its arms to a renewed flood of immigrants from Europe in the 1920’s, and processed them on Ellis Island in New York, the new citizens were rewarded with their first ‘American meal.’ The Commissioner for the island decreed that it should contain ice cream, a substance unknown to many of the new arrivals. Some of them mistook it for frozen butter, and tried to spread it on their bread. The American obsession with the frozen dessert continues. This is a country, after all, where July has been designated official “Ice Cream Month”, and where the third Sunday of July is officially “National Ice Cream Day”. This celebration of ice cream owes its inception to a Senate Resolution proclaimed by President Ronald Reagan on the ninth of July, 1984.
Reagan’s proclamation was apparently issued as a result of lobbying from the International Ice Cream Association, part of the International Dairy Foods Association whose members represent more than 85% of the total volume of milk, cultured products, cheese, ice cream and frozen desserts produced in the United States. The industry is now worth seventy billion dollars a year. According to the official wording of the presidential decree, the country recognises that “ice cream is a nutritious and wholesome food, enjoyed by over ninety percent of the people in the United States. It enjoys a reputation as the perfect dessert and snack food.” And the amounts consumed “provide jobs for thousands of citizens and contribute substantially to the economic well-being of the Nation’s dairy industry.”
The majority of the vanilla beans imported into the USA are used for making vanilla flavour extracts and essence. Naturally, much of that flavouring eventually goes into ice cream. I discovered that ice cream makers, large and small, were surprisingly reluctant to let me see their factories in action. Time and again, well-known companies on both sides of the Atlantic made plans to allow me to watch them making their famous ice cream and then cancelled the arrangement. Eventually, an ice cream executive told me why. “Look, we don’t need publicity of that sort,” he said, asking not to be identified. “It’s the same with any food product—no-one will take the risk that you might reveal how simple the manufacturing processes are, and then people might start questioning the value of what they buy in a tub of ice cream. Most of our added value,” he continued, “is in marketing the product as something people want to eat, let’s face it they don’t need to eat ice cream. None of the big boys want to stick their neck out and risk you writing something that doesn’t fit with the brand image.”
One household name brand of ice cream prides itself on its ‘homemade’ image, and even offers public tours of its factory. Explaining that I was simply interested in seeing the final incarnation of vanilla beans as they end up in a tub of ice cream, I asked if I could watch the process at close quarters. After months of negotiation, they said I could take the public tour, but visiting the factory floor would be out of the question. It was the same story in America, the UK and France.
Finally, I did visit an ice cream plant. A vanilla importer with family connections in the ice cream trade arranged it, but said, “they don’t really want publicity”. Tucked into the gently rolling landscape of northern Pennsylvania there is an old farm which once operated as a dairy. The farm is still there, but the dairy business has taken over much of the land for factory space. It now makes twenty-six million gallons of ice cream each year.
I watched 6,000 gallon milk tankers unloading their swishing white cargo into the loading bay and saw them test each batch for unwanted anti-biotic, freshness, butter-fat content and protein. I saw buckets of frozen pasteurised egg yolk mixed with sugar, bulked up with skimmed milk powder, whey powder and stabilisers before it was poured into giant steel vats and liquefied with milk. Inside an enormous labyrinthine network of steel tubes and wire grilles I heard the liquid being homogenised by being sheared under pressures of two thousand pounds per square inch. Throbbing, churning, warming mixtures were batched and blended in three thousand gallon steel tanks that looked like fat space rockets. Every stage of the process was monitored and measured by computerised control panels. There were people involved, but surprisingly few, mainly to pour the raw ingredients into the mixing tanks, and keep an eye on the gauges. Finally, the white liquid came down a spout into rectangular steel vats holding five hundred gallons of mixture. Enormous paddles stirred the opaque pools, while nearby gauges were programmed with selected recipes. The amount of cream, the viscosity and the amount of air (crucial to ice cream consistency and flavour) were all punched into the great machines while flavourings were added. Forked metal arms upended tubs of unctuous bright yellow peanut butter and swarthy variegated brownie butter, too sweet to taste on their own. And there, in a great creamy swirling lake was the vanilla ice cream. In the middle of the assembly line it passed through a pair of freezers as big as lorries, chilling it to semi-liquid hardness at a staggering sixteen hundred gallons an hour. It glooped down a hose into cardboard tubs whose lids dropped from a conveyor with a satisfying pock-pock-pock sound and then flew along a track to be wrapped in cellophane and placed on trays for loading. In a refrigerated warehouse there were men in winter coats, woollen hats and gloves so thick their fingers wouldn’t bend. The temperature was
–40° Fahrenheit and in one section great fans produced a wind chill that took it down to –70°. The freezing conditions were needed to make sure each carton reached a core temperature of –20° before it was shipped. A battered ghetto-blaster pumped out a barely tuned radio station as they piled the cartons onto palettes and loaded them into refrigerated lorries. In the dim light of the warehouse they laboured, only their eyes showing through swaddling scarves. My nose started to crackle inside as the mucous froze, and dressed in lightweight clothes I was desperate to leave. The tubs were frosted with ice. Quickly smearing the rime away I peered at the side of a carton so that I could read what it said. Ingredients: Cream, Nonfat Milk, Sugar, Vanilla, Vanilla Bean.
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As the population increases, the consumption of ice cream grows steadily in the USA, somewhere between two and three percent each year. Food manufacturers fight vigorously for a share of that market, because the annual domestic sales of ice cream alone in the USA are worth more than twenty billion dollars. Vanilla remains the most popular flavour, accounting for more than a third of the one and a quarter billion individual ice cream products sold annually. In quantity, that figure that translates into just over twenty-two litres of ice cream for every individual in the country each year. In the UK we consume a mere eight litres each per year, while the Scandinavians manage almost thirteen litres. British ice cream buyers choose vanilla ninety percent of the time.
Worldwide, annual global sales of ice cream now topping thirteen billion litres, a figure which is likely to rise as previously untapped markets such as the Far East, expand. In countries like China, a burgeoning middle class is being tempted to spend its money on what the flavouring industry calls ‘non-essential foods’. Western dietary habits are fast spreading, along with the developed world’s waistlines.
In principle, the demand for natural vanilla should continue to rise. Apart from ice creams, many of the best known colas contain real vanilla, as of course do the specific ‘vanilla’ versions of these drinks. Flavouring essence made from cured vanilla beans is an essential part of these products’ carefully constructed flavour identity. The art and science of creating food and fragrance compounds is itself an enormous industry, with an annual value estimated at over sixteen billion US dollars. Market leaders in the field, such as the Swiss based Givaudan corporation and its American rival International Flavors and Fragrances, have combined sales of more than four billion dollars annually. To manufacture the individual (and carefully concocted) tastes which give their products its identity, food makers need vanilla. Flavour suppliers, essence manufacturers and food companies all have to find sources for good quality vanilla beans, either through their own direct efforts or through a broker who knows the market well. It is a process shrouded in secrecy.
Food manufacturers are always reluctant to divulge the details of their ingredients, in spite of labelling regulations which purport to tell consumers what they are buying. Both in Europe and the USA, there are regulatory standards governing the way in which vanilla ‘extract’ is made, and specifying that it must be made with Vanilla planifolia or Vanilla tahitensis. The basic industrial strength of extract also requires that 100 grams of beans are used per litre of 35% alcohol (13·35 oz per gallon), to produce what is known as ‘single-fold’ extract. Chefs and cooks will use this type of extract, but commercial ice cream makers will need three or four fold extract—made with three or four times the amount of beans per litre of extractive alcohol. To economise, food manufacturers using real vanilla are often tempted to switch to an artificial substitute—usually made with vanillin, a chemical which occurs in vanilla beans but can also be synthesised from other materials, including coal-tar.
Part of the mystery and sensuous appeal of the vanilla bean comes from its complex chemistry. During curing, when the beans are dipped in hot water, the structure of their cell walls is disrupted, provoking an enzymatic reaction which allows ferulic acid to degrade and eventually transform itself into vanillin and vanillic acid. Commercial vanilla beans are judged, in part, on the amount of vanillin they contain—usually around two percent, but occasionally as high as three or four percent. Beans which are cured too rapidly will not develop high quantities of vanillin.
Vanillin, just one of several hundred chemicals in vanilla, is known to chemists as C8H8O3 (4–Hydroxy-3–methoxybenzaldehyde). For more than a century it has been possible to synthesise vanillin, and today it is the most commonly produced flavour compound in the world with an annual market of twelve thousand tonnes. It is cheaper, and stronger than natural vanilla flavour and widely used in food manufacturing, household scents and as an anti-microbial agent in fruit purées. Safe for human consumption, it is also more chemically stable at high cooking temperatures, but more importantly it saves manufacturers money. For American ice cream manufacturers, vanilla extract typically costs around seventy-three cents per gallon as opposed to about twelve cents per gallon for artificial vanilla flavour made with vanillin from other sources. In premium grade ice cream this means natural vanilla extract would account for as much as three percent of the cost of ingredients, a significant figure in such a competitive market. Ice cream made with natural vanilla would, however, probably taste better. I say probably because many consumers have never tasted the difference. Taste-tests conducted by flavour manufacturers have revealed that many people prefer the taste of artificial vanilla, simply because it is the taste they know.
This is depressing news for vanilla growers. Less depressing is the rapid growth in recent years of products whose brand image relies on their perceived excellence based on all natural ingredients—ice cream brands like Ben and Jerry’s and Haagen-Dazs’ are obvious examples. Brands like these rely heavily on consumers identifying them as above average products, and the manufacturers hope people will buy them because they associate their product with excellent ingredients. In effect, it is safe to assume that the more expensive a product is, the more likely it is to contain natural vanilla.
Vanilla extract (in tandem with vanillin) is a staple building block for flavour around the world. It is widely used in the production of chocolates, bakery products, ice creams, chewing gums, dairy products, cocoa drinks, pharmaceuticals, fragrances and deodorants. There has never been a more versatile food ingredient.
Vanilla is also an important ingredient in perfumery, where it provides a warm, sensual base ‘note’, the term parfumiers to divide and describe the different elements in their fragrances. The top note is the scent you get when you open the perfume bottle, the so-called signature of the aroma which makes the first impact. This is the most volatile element in the fragrance and it is the one which is often lost after a short time. Next comes the middle note, especially when the perfume is applied to the skin, where it is warmed and absorbed. The middle note remains active over several hours. Later, perhaps in the evening, the nose picks up the base notes of the scent, the less volatile but more sensual parts of the aroma. Here, vanilla can be used at the very heart of a perfume. The parfumier’s art rests in combining the volatile and the heavy notes to generate what they call an evaporation profile. The less volatile notes are the ones which impart high sensuality to the fragrance, the vanilla, amber or musky elements of the mixture. And, just as in the food industry, some of the most expensive ingredients come from nature. Vanilla imparts a deep rich, balsamic note to perfume. Vanilla has contributed to some of the most memorably perfumes of the past century, including Shalimar by Guerlain, and Chanel N° 5. More recently it has been an element in Thierry Mugler’s Angel, Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium, Dune by Dior and Tresor by Lancome. Jean-Paul Guerlain once remarked that “vanilla has a secret charm, a power to evoke tastes and aromas in equal measure. It can be suave, sublime, or sensual and it has conquered the palette of the parfumier.”
Perfumery requires different chemical skills than baking or ice cream making. Instead of vanilla extracts, the parfumiers must use very high concentrations of the vanilla aroma. The most highly refined of these products is ‘vanilla absolute’, extracted using liquid CO2 or hydrocarbon solvents, creating a liquid which is completely soluble in ethanol and perfume oils. Vanilla ‘absolute’ costs approximately five thousand dollars a kilogram, and is therefore used for only the highest quality fragrances, whereas the same amount of vanillin for perfumery costs less than twenty dollars. Once again, higher priced products will be more likely to contain the real thing.
Away from the rarefied atmosphere of the great perfume houses, the scent of vanilla has been the subject of other experiments. Malaysian chemists have reported that vanilla may be an antidote for certain virulent jellyfish stings. It also repels many insects, and one American lady told me that she remembers her mother smearing vanilla extract onto her arms and legs to guard against mosquitoes during hot autumn nights.
Olfactory researchers have calculated that ninety percent of what we call ‘taste’ is actually ‘smell’. If we cannot smell whatever it is we put into our mouths, then we are unlikely to be able to identify its taste. Dietitians have used the relationship between taste and smell to help persistent over-eaters to lose weight. In a scientific study at a London hospital, severely obese patients were given scented patches (similar to the nicotine patches used by smokers) to affix to their skin. According to Catherine Collins, the hospital’s chief dietitian, those exposed to a vanilla scent lost the most weight—several pounds more than other patients.
Other medical studies have shown that vanilla-like odours seem to have a calming effect, and some hospitals add it to their air-conditioning systems in the belief it will promote a more tranquil atmosphere in the medical environment. Meanwhile, Dr. Alan Hirsch at Chicago’s Smell and Taste Foundation has carried out extensive tests on the erotic potential of certain odours. Vanilla, he found, had the ability to increase involuntary blood flow to the penis in men while they were sleeping. However, he points out that numerous smells had a similar effect, and the smell of pumpkin pie gave a particularly impressive result. Vanilla performed credibly however, and seemed most effective with older men, perhaps suggesting that they associated the smell with pleasant childhood memories.
In the 1950’s, the soda-jerks of America’s drug-stores would announce the arrival of attractive female customers to the kitchen staff by shouting; “Vanilla!” On one level it was an innocent double entendre, but at another it conveyed the hidden, sensuous overtones of the flavour itself. They implied something delectable and tasty, but disguised it with a commonplace term. The trend continues, although the innocence of the soda fountain has been lost. As a racial epithet, vanilla and chocolate, are sometimes used as synonyms for white and black. In recent years the term ‘vanilla’ has been applied extensively by bankers to describe investments that are relatively risk free, the implication being that the financial returns will not vary from what is expected of them. Implying that they might bring higher than average returns, one respected financial newspaper recently carried the headline: “Government Investment Certificates are no longer just plain vanilla!”
There is a song entitled Vanilla Sex by the underground punk band
Nofx:
So stay in your missionary position
I hope that you got bored to death
There’s no way I’m going through life
Having vanilla sex …
The lyrics alerted me to a hitherto undiscovered sexual terminology, in which ‘vanilla sex’ is used to describe conventional heterosexual relations rather than anything involving bondage or other arcane sexual practices. The phrase ‘plain old vanilla’ has become synonymous with standardisation and blandness. It hardly seems fit for the luscious substance.
Given its commercial ubiquity, it is no surprise that the USA is the world’s largest importer of vanilla beans. The men who procure the beans are a small band of individuals with extremely specialised knowledge about their commodity. Once upon a time they were gentlemanly types from the East Coast of the USA who based themselves in the Philadelphia and New Jersey area where they could easily handle and inspect incoming cargoes of beans arriving by ship. As prices have peaked in recent years, the prospects of high profits have drawn inexperienced, but extremely wealthy, speculators into the market. Some of these speculators have been attracted by the prospect of doing business on a purely cash basis. It is also the kind of trade with the potential to attract dirty money. In the face of increasing competition for the raw material they need, the vanilla brokers—old and new—have acquired a reputation for ruthlessness. Vanilla beans from Madagascar are at the heart of their trade.