40 Fun Facts About Vanilla

Vanilla beans are the cured seed pods of a climbing vine that belongs to which family of flowering plants?

Orchids are grown mostly for show, and vanilla is the only one widely used to flavour food. Its pods are not true beans, which belong to the unrelated legume family.

Hand-pollinated flower by flower, vanilla is the world's second most expensive spice by weight, behind which one?

Saffron is even more laborious: each crocus flower offers just three crimson stigmas to collect and dry. Vanilla's cost comes from tending, pollinating and curing every pod by hand.

Which island country off East Africa became the world's chief vanilla grower after French colonists planted it there?

Madagascar received its first vines along with instructions for pollinating them by hand. Most of its crop now grows in Sava, a north-eastern region named from the initials of its four main towns.

Castoreum, a secretion that has flavoured vanilla substitutes and scented leathery perfumes, comes from which animal?

Beaver castor sacs make it for marking territory, and US regulators list the extract as safe to eat. Hardly any reaches food now: about 100 kilograms a year, against over a million of vanillin.

Mayu Yamamoto won an Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry for extracting vanilla's main flavour compound from which material?

Cow dung earned her the 2007 prize, a spoof award for research that makes people laugh, then think. A Massachusetts ice cream parlour unveiled a flavour in her honour at the ceremony.

Which American president brought a taste for vanilla ice cream home from France and wrote out his own recipe?

Thomas Jefferson wrote the recipe in the 1780s, and the page survives in the Library of Congress. The French had been flavouring ice cream with vanilla since earlier that century.

On which French island did Edmond Albius, an enslaved 12-year-old, work out how to pollinate vanilla flowers by hand?

Réunion soon became the world's leading vanilla supplier, and his quick thumb-and-stick method is still used. Albius was freed in 1848 but saw no reward, dying in poverty.

The label French vanilla comes from a French style of making ice cream with a base containing which ingredient?

Egg yolks turn the base into a custard, which is why French vanilla now names a rich, custardy flavour and says nothing about where the pods were grown.

From the 1930s, most artificial vanilla flavouring was made from lignin-rich waste left over by which industry?

Papermaking strips lignin, a natural polymer, out of wood pulp, and chemists turned that waste into vanillin. By 1981 a single Ontario mill supplied 60% of the world's synthetic vanillin.

Which conquistador is credited with introducing both vanilla and chocolate to Europe in the 1520s?

Hernán Cortés met the pairing in Mexico, where vanilla was stirred into cacao drinks. Europeans went on treating it as a mere additive to chocolate for most of a century.

Which empire, after conquering the vanilla growers of Mexico's Gulf coast, began mixing pods into cacao drinks?

The Aztec probably used vanilla to tame the bitterness of cacao, since they had no sugar cane to sweeten it. Their spiced drink later inspired modern hot chocolate.

Which people of Mexico's eastern coast were among the first to farm vanilla and used it to perfume their temples?

The Totonac also tucked vanilla into amulets as a lucky charm. They stayed the world's main producers until the mid-19th century, when island plantations overtook them.

The word vanilla comes from a diminutive of vaina, meaning a pod or sheath, in which language?

Spanish vainilla means little pod, a nod to the long, slim fruit. Vaina itself descends from the Latin word for a sheath.

Each vanilla flower must be pollinated by hand before it wilts; about how long does a single blossom stay open?

One day is all a blossom gets: it opens in the morning and closes that afternoon, never to reopen. Growers walk their vines every morning through a flowering season of about two months.

Hugh Morgan, a court apothecary, made chocolate-free sweetmeats flavoured with vanilla for which English monarch?

Elizabeth I was served vanilla as a flavour in its own right around 1602. Until Morgan's sweetmeats, Europeans had treated it as little more than a seasoning for chocolate.

Taha'a, nicknamed the Vanilla Island for the aroma that hangs over it, belongs to which Pacific territory?

French Polynesia grows a distinct hybrid vanilla with shorter, broader pods, and Taha'a produces about 80% of it. The crop arrived in 1848, brought by an admiral.

Bourbon vanilla has no link to whiskey; its label honours an island colony once named after which of these?

A French royal dynasty, the Bourbons, lent its name to an Indian Ocean island that led the vanilla trade in the 19th century. The label now covers pods from neighbouring islands too.

Which South American seed, barred from US food since 1954 over its coumarin, has been used to fake cheap vanilla?

Tonka bean smells enough like vanilla that in 1996 US regulators warned shoppers about suspiciously cheap bottles sold in Mexico. Its coumarin is toxic only in very large doses.

Under US rules, a bottle labelled pure vanilla extract must contain at least 35 per cent of which ingredient?

Alcohol does the extracting: pods are steeped in ethanol and water, which draws out several hundred flavour compounds. The same rule demands 100 grams of pods in every litre.

Curing vanilla pods takes four stages: sweating, slow-drying, conditioning and a first step known by which grim name?

Killing stops the pod growing, by hot water, oven heat, freezing or scratching, and sets off the enzymes that build the aroma. A freshly picked pod has very little flavour of its own.

Vanillin, the main flavour compound of vanilla, also seeps into whisky and wine as they age in barrels of which wood?

Oak passes vanillin to the liquid inside, which is why aged spirits can taste of vanilla with none added. Heat creates the same compound in roasted coffee and maple syrup.

Which soft-drink brand tested a vanilla blend at the 1982 World's Fair but waited until 2002 to launch it?

Coca-Cola billed the launch as its greatest innovation since the diet version, then pulled the drink from North America in 2005 as sales fell. It came back two years later.

Which sweet soft drink, often vanilla-flavoured in the United States, is sold in clear, golden-brown and pink versions?

Cream soda means something else in Japan: a float of green melon soda topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Which French perfume house is said to have created Shalimar by pouring synthetic vanilla into its scent Jicky?

Guerlain first made Shalimar in 1921, and its vanilla note came from ethylvanillin, a lab-made cousin about three times as potent as vanillin.

In finance, basic put and call contracts are known as plain vanilla options, as opposed to which other kind?

Exotic options carry extra twists, while plain vanilla ones are the no-frills standard. The phrase took hold after cheap artificial flavouring made vanilla the basic, everyday ice cream.

Several wild vanilla species grow in the contiguous United States, all confined to the south of which state?

Florida hosts a small outpost of a genus of about 110 species, spread across the tropics from the Americas to West Africa, Asia and New Guinea.

World vanilla prices twice spiked to about 500 dollars a kilogram after growers were hit by which kind of disaster?

A cyclone struck the main growing island in 2000 and another in 2017, and each was followed by prices near $500 a kilogram. In between, the price sank as low as $20.

Which Southeast Asian country is one of the world's two biggest vanilla growers, with about a quarter of the crop?

Indonesia grew 25% of the world's raw vanilla in 2023. Together with one African island nation, it accounts for about two-thirds of the global supply.

In Britain and Australia, a vanilla slice is a local take on which French pastry of puff pastry layered with cream?

Mille-feuille means thousand sheets, for its many layers of pastry. Australians set the custard filling firm with gelatin, and in parts of Victoria the result is fondly nicknamed a snot block.

In which city did a vanilla vine flower for the first time in Europe, in a private plant collection in 1806?

London's plant supplied cuttings to Paris and the Netherlands, and from those the French stocked their tropical colonies. The transplanted vines grew well but bore no fruit.

Vanilla's old Mexican name, tlilxochitl, has traditionally been translated into English as which two words?

Black flower is probably a mistranslation: black pod fits better, because the picked fruit shrivels and darkens. The blossom itself is a pale greenish-yellow.

In 1874, German chemists Tiemann and Haarmann made vanillin from a compound found in the bark of which tree?

Pine bark holds coniferin, which the pair turned into vanillin. They then set up a factory in Holzminden and began producing the flavour on an industrial scale.

Until the 1920s, factories made artificial vanilla flavouring from eugenol, the fragrant oil of which spice?

Cloves supplied the eugenol behind commercial vanillin from the late 19th century until the 1920s, which made one spice the raw material for imitating another.

The white dust of pure vanillin crystals seen on top-quality cured vanilla pods is nicknamed after which wintry thing?

Frost appears when vanillin, about 2% of a cured pod's dry weight, crystallises on the surface. It is seen on cured pods of high quality.

Which flap inside a vanilla flower separates the male and female parts, so that a worker must lift it to pollinate?

Rostellum is the barrier that stops the flower pollinating itself. Edmond Albius's trick was to lift it with a thin stick and smear the pollen across with his thumb.

Traces of vanillin turned up in wine jars used by the elite of which ancient city before its destruction in 586 BCE?

Jerusalem's jars hint at an unidentified Old World vanilla species, in use long before the Mexican spice crossed the Atlantic in the 16th century.

On a plantation, the living tree that a vanilla vine climbs for support goes by which schoolroom name?

Tutor trees would carry the vine out of reach if left alone, so growers fold its top back down every year to keep it at arm's height. The folding also makes it flower far more.

Gamers and programmers describe software as vanilla when it has never been what, a usage borrowed from ice cream?

Modified is the opposite of vanilla: a vanilla game has no add-ons or fan-made mods, and a vanilla kernel comes straight from its original developers. The slang nods to ice cream's plainest flavour.

Which French château town lends its name to whipped cream that has been sweetened and flavoured with vanilla?

Chantilly cream is often credited, without evidence, to François Vatel, who ran the château's kitchens in the 17th century. The town's name was first tied to whipped cream about a century later.

Which bright yellow Italian liqueur, an ingredient of the Harvey Wallbanger, is known for its vanilla top note?

Galliano gets its hallmark flavour from vanilla that is pressed separately and infused after the other herbs have been distilled. Its tall bottle is shaped like a Roman column.