Île Bourbon (Réunion) 1941
The Edible Orchid
What does it mean when the most common scent in the world owes its proliferation to a child who was not allowed a legitimate name?
Vanilla travelled from sacred Totonac gardens to Aztec tribute lists, then across oceans into European glasshouses where the vines flowered but would not bear fruit. It took Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy on a French colonial island, to unlock the secret of hand-pollination that meant the world could widely share this beloved scent.
“A sweet, warm note, at once languorous and exotic.”
Joris-Karl Huysmans, French novelist and art critic
Cultural context
On Edmund's deathbed, he reflects on his life. He is known today as Edmond Albius, although he never had a second name when he was born, because he was born enslaved, in the year 1829. He never met his mother. She died giving birth to him. He never knew his father either.
The Totonac people of Veracruz in the Gulf of Mexico were the first cultivators of Vanilla planifolia, a climbing orchid, for centuries before anyone else knew it existed. It was a vine they called xanat, which means hidden flower, named after the legend of Princess Xanat who could not fall in love with a mortal so became a vanilla orchid to be close to the one she loved.
As an expansionist empire, the Aztecs conquered the Totonac in the late fifteenth century and extracted vanilla as tribute, adding it to xocolatl, the chocolate drink served at Moctezuma II's court. It then passed to Hernán Cortés, a Spanish military adventurer who arrived in 1519, was served a cup, and took both chocolate and vanilla back to Spain.
For three hundred years, European botanists tried and failed to grow vanilla outside Mexico. The plants thrived, flowered, and produced nothing. Vanilla had co-evolved with a single species of stingless bee, Melipona, native only to Mexico. Without it, every flower died unfertilised.
In 1841, on the French colonial island of Île Bourbon (now Réunion), Edmond Albius — enslaved, twelve years old — worked on the plantation of a botanist named Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont. He had watched his master try to hand-pollinate a watermelon and understood, with the gift of curiosity, that the same could be done with vanilla. He worked out that you could transfer pollen by hand using a thin stick, lifting a tiny membrane and pressing it to the stigma in a single gesture lasting less than a second. He showed the other workers. Within a decade, Réunion was the world's largest vanilla producer.
The technique, known as vanilla marriage, spread to Madagascar, 800 kilometres away. Despite its size — the fourth largest island in the world, so ancient that eight out of ten plants grow only there — Madagascar is today one of the poorest nations on Earth. Every vanilla pod is still pollinated by hand, one flower at a time, using Edmond's method.
Edmond was freed in 1848 when France abolished slavery in its colonies. He died in poverty in 1880, largely uncredited. A celebrated botanist from Paris later tried to claim the discovery as his own. Ferréol wrote to the governor twice to confirm that the discovery was Edmond's. That oily black vanilla bean had made the white man rich, in the same way that Black men had made them rich as slaves. The world was given sweetness because of him.
In the world
Industry infiltrates air
1841 was not only a literary and political turning point; it was a sensory one. Steam, coal smoke, wet wool, lamp oil, ink, river fog, violets, tobacco, orange blossom water were widely experienced and the modern world had a new smell which people were beginning to notice. As cities expanded and industry intensified, fragrance became more than adornment: it became memory, escape, atmosphere, even resistance.
The nose
Jacques Guerlain
In 1925, Jacques Guerlain poured a splash of Shalimar concentrate into a bottle of Jicky as a reported experiment in front of a maharajah at the Paris Exposition. The result became Shalimar: vanillic, incense-warmed, talc-soft, an oriental that defined a whole fragrance family and remains one of the best-selling fragrances in history. The irony is that vanilla's actual geography ran the other way: Mexico to Spain to Réunion to Madagascar, colonial extraction all the way down.
Now
Vanilla is among the world’s most expensive spices, often second only to saffron. High-quality Madagascan vanilla has at times sold for more than US$600 per kilogram. The orchids are still pollinated by hand, and each pod is cured over months of careful labour, yet many of the farmers who grow vanilla receive only a small share of its final value.