No Mexico, no ice cream

  

When I was a student at Northgate Grammar School for boys in Ipswich one of my friends, Roderick Strutt, lived nearby in Brunswick Road. His home had a large garden in which there was no space for two young boys to play. The reason was simple Roderick’s father was a dahlia enthusiast and almost the entire garden was dedicated to cultivation of the flowers. So was the garden of his brother next door.

 

What might this have to do with ice cream? The answer – Mexico.

 

Dahlias originated from Mexico and Central America. For ancient Mexicans they were a food crop (they ate the tubers), not blooms for display at Suffolk village shows.

 

Here in Puerto Vallarta Jan and I met another flower enthusiast, T J Hartung, a retired computer systems specialist and former US navy sonar operator. TJ’s love is orchids – Mexico has 1,383 varieties and 609 of them exist only in Mexico.

 

Having made the Mexico connection with my boyhood friend, the next question is what has all this to do with ice cream? Well, what is your favourite flavour? If it is vanilla, then if Hernán Cortés had never drunk chocolate with Emperor Moctezuma Xocoyotzin you would be disappointed to find your beloved flavour missing from the fridge.

Vanilla beans.

Vanilla, TJ told us, is made from the beans of orchids, more specifically from one of three types of vanilla orchid (the remaining 132 species do not produce beans useful for commercial purposes) and all three originate from Mexico. The combined flavours of cacao and vanilla beans in the drink that the Aztec ruler offered him so captivated Cortés that he sent vanilla beans to the King of Spain. Later he sent the vines that produce the beans, hoping to produce vanilla back home. However, Spanish growers were unable to persuade the vines to produce beans. As TJ told us, had they asked the Totonac people of modern Veracruz state, who had produced vanilla for 10,000 years, the Spaniards might have saved a lot of wasted time and expense. But they did not ask, so for 300 years Mexico had a de facto monopoly on vanilla. Incidentally, the derivation of vanilla is the Spanish word meaning “little scabbard” – the Spaniards thought that the dried bean resembled a scabbard.

Vanilla planifolia.

Vanilla is a vine that grows up trees, or on farms on concrete posts. Vines can be as much as 100 feet long. The East coast variety, Vanilla planifolia produces beans that are 6-9 inches long; the west coast Vanilla Pompona 4-6 inches. Cultivation is laborious since the vines must be hand pollinated daily, the life span of a flower. Then begins the really hard work, using the Mexican method (as opposed to the Bourbon method, which is much quicker).

In Mexico, mature pods are dried in the sun, then wrapped in wool blankets, placed in a wooden chest covered with another wool blanket to keep the pods warm. This process continues for about six weeks. Beans are then stored in open air sheds to dry. The curing process can take up to a year. The Bourbon method is much faster: beans are steeped in hot water for several minutes. This alters the flavour slightly, so Bourbon vanilla is not the same as Mexican vanilla.

Killing and sweating of vanilla beans.

Storing and inspecting vanilla beans.

In a world obsessed with the spice trade, many powerful people wanted to get their hands on vanilla plants to control its source. A British apothecary, Hugh Morgan, introduced Queen Elizabeth I to vanilla – she loved it. Thomas Jefferson ordered the US ambassador in France to send him 50 vanilla beans. It became popular in America as a flavouring, a medicine – and an aphrodisiac.

 

And in 1830, 300 years after Cortés drank vanilla-flavoured chocolate with Moctezuma, Charles Morren, a French botanist discovered that the vanilla flowers had to be hand pollinated, but he did not publish his method, so Mexico remained the only source. But then in 1841 Edmund Albias, an illiterate slave on the island of Bourbon (now Réunion) discovered how to pollinate vanilla flowers by hand. That ended the Mexican monopoly.

 

Cultivation and processing make vanilla expensive – only saffron costs more. However, in the 19^th century, a method was devised to produce artificial vanilla flavour from waste wood pulp.

 

As for ice cream, its history goes back to the Phoenicians, and from then until the mid-19^th century it was usually served as frozen cream with fruits and berries. Then in 1847, a Pennsylvania lady, Nancy Johnson, invented a hand-cranked machine for making ice cream. This expanded the market, made room for new flavours and demand for vanilla boomed.

 Information and photos courtesy of T J Hartung.