Vanilla

Vanilla is grown as a climbing vine planted at the base of a support such as a garden tree or shaded trellis, since it prefers good air flow and bright, dappled shade rather than full sun. Being semi-epiphytic, it can be rooted in the ground or mounted as an air plant. Nursery cuttings 24 to 36 inches long typically root and begin flowering within two to three years, while shorter cuttings need three to four years, and flowering starts once a vine's stem reaches about a quarter to half an inch in diameter. Once established, the vine needs relatively little watering, pruning, or feeding.

Harvest: Because vanilla is not self-pollinating, flowers must be hand-pollinated for pods to set, and each bloom opens for only a single day. A pollinated flower takes about eight to ten months to mature into a pod, and pickers watch for the tip to begin yellowing as a sign that the bean is ready, since that ripe window passes quickly before the pod spoils.

Curing: After picking, the beans are blanched and then dried in the sun over several months, a process that shrivels them to their familiar dark, glossy color and develops the vanilla aroma. Cured pods are graded by moisture content, with plumper, higher-moisture beans sold as gourmet grade and drier, more brittle beans reserved for extract production.

Culinary: The cured beans are the source of natural vanilla extract and are used whole or scraped for baking, confectionery, and dairy desserts, including ice cream, long the most popular ice cream flavor in the United States. Home cooks can make their own extract by splitting cured beans lengthwise and steeping them in vodka inside a dark bottle for about two months, then keeping the finished extract away from light to preserve its flavor.

Industrial: Beyond the kitchen, vanilla is used as a fragrance in perfumes, soaps, and candles, and as a flavoring in syrups for medications.

Cultural: Long before it reached global markets, the Totonac people burned vanilla as a temple fragrance and carried it in amulets as a good-luck charm, alongside using it to flavor food and drink. After the Aztecs took over Totonac territory, they adopted vanilla to flavor a cacao drink called xocolatl, regarded as an ancestor of modern hot chocolate.

Medicinal: Vanilla has also been used traditionally for complaints such as intestinal gas, fever, and tooth decay, and as a purported aphrodisiac or anxiety remedy, though these folk uses lack supporting scientific evidence.

Vanilla planifolia grew wild around the Gulf of Mexico and south toward Central America and the Caribbean before people began cultivating it. The Totonac people of what is now Veracruz, Mexico, are credited with its earliest domestication, farming vanilla since at least 1185, and the Aztecs adopted the crop after conquering Totonac lands in 1427. Spanish explorers carried vanilla to Europe in the 1520s, but the vine could not set fruit outside Mexico without its natural pollinator until 1841, when Edmond Albius, an enslaved boy on the French island of Réunion, worked out how to pollinate the flowers by hand. That technique let colonial growers establish vanilla in Madagascar, Réunion, and other Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian territories, which by the late 19th century had become the crop's leading producers.