![]() He was so thrilled with it that he copied down a recipe, now preserved in the Library of Congress. By the next century, the French were using vanilla to flavor ice cream-a treat discovered by Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s, when he lived in Paris as American Minister to France. Vanilla was thought of as nothing more than an additive for chocolate until the early 17th Century, when Hugh Morgan-a creative apothecary in the employ of Queen Elizabeth I-invented chocolate-free, all-vanilla-flavored sweetmeats. The Aztecs drank their chocolatl with a dash of vanilla, and Europeans, once they got used to the stuff (one appalled Spaniard described chocolate as “a drink for pigs”), followed suit. ![]() One source claims that it was introduced to western Europe by Hernán Cortés-though at the time it was eclipsed by his other American imports, which included jaguars, opossums, an armadillo, and an entire team of ballplayers equipped with bouncing rubber balls. The Aztecs acquired vanilla when they conquered the Totonacs in the 15th Century the Spanish, in turn, got it when they conquered the Aztecs. Vanilla is a native of South and Central America and the Caribbean and the first people to have cultivated it seem to have been the Totonacs of Mexico’s east coast. Vanilla is a member of the orchid family, a sprawling conglomeration of some 25,000 different species. The truth is, though, that plain vanilla is anything but dull. A plain-vanilla wardrobe lacks pizzazz plain-vanilla technologies lack bells and whistles plain-vanilla automobiles miss out on chrome, fins, and flashy hood ornaments and plain-vanilla music is the sort of soulless drone that afflicts us in elevators. Given our passion for vanilla, it seems peculiar that “plain vanilla” is the going synonym for anything basic, bland, or blah. ![]() On the other hand, the International Ice Cream Association, which should know, puts vanilla at the top of the charts as first choice of 29 percent of ice-cream eaters, feebly followed by chocolate (8.9 percent), butter pecan (5.3 percent), and strawberry (5.3 percent). ![]() There’s a little waffling here: one source claims that actually it’s Democrats who prefer vanilla, while Republicans go for chocolate and a Baskin-Robbins poll found that there’s a substantial contingent in the Southwest that shuns both in favor of mint chocolate chip. We sell single rooted cuttings that vary in length.By and large, Americans seem to like vanilla ice cream better than chocolate. The photo is of a mature plant with several cuttings is a 6" pot. Once cured, they can be placed in alcohol for 6 to 12 months to create the extract. You can hand pollinate the flowers and after a few months have a seed pod which can be cured. The flowers last one day, but can blossom more than once from the same inflorescence. You can run the growths up and down a 6 foot trellis for best control without taking up too much space. It is difficult to say when they will flower, but on average this species needs to be well over 10 feet in length to bloom. ![]() Provide high light, and fertilize as you would any other orchid. Allow the medium to just approach dryness, but don't allow it to dry out completely. They are intermediate to hot-growing, and develop rapidly in a peat, or sphagnum moss-based mix. The roots will grab onto and curl around anything they touch, especially if you have good humidity. They can grow for indefinite lengths (some specimen reaching several hundred feet) and many will control their growth using a trellis or any kind of wooden structure. The planifolia species is the most commonly used Vanilla in flavoring. Vanilla's one-of-a-kind culinary qualities owe to the complexity of the numerous chemical compounds inherent in it. Native to Mexico and Central America, Vanilla has been among the world's most important plants - among spices, it is second only to saffron in value. ![]()
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