Vanilla: A History

‘Vanilla’ has come to mean ‘standard’, ‘ordinary’ or even ‘boring, but the actual plant that Vanilla flavor originally comes from is quite the opposite. Vanilla plants are a kind of orchid native to the tropical Americas, and the quintessentially ‘normal’ flavor didn’t appear in the Old World until the 16th century. But the story of Vanilla is considerably more complex than that, a centuries long epic involving child geniuses, chemistry, and of course vanilla itself, a much more complex flavor than it is given credit for.