6.5.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and to
day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated June
twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is a
reading service intended for people who are blind or of
other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
Please join me now for the article titled the bitter

(00:22):
Sweet beginnings of vanilla cultivation can be traced back to
the far flung isle of Rayugnon. A journey to the
remote Indian Ocean island reveals the story behind the fragrant, delicious,
ubiquitous spice and the enslaved youth who made it a
commercial success. By J. Cheschey's a flight from Paris to

(00:46):
the island of Rayugnon, a French overseas department in the
Indian Ocean, takes eleven hours, skirting the smoldering crater of
the Picton de la Fournees volcano before landing just shy
of the water, but after disembarking at Roland Garos airport.
The pioneering French aviator was from Reignon. You find yourself

(01:09):
in a tropical paradise with all the trappings of its motherland,
with French wine and cheeses in its supermarkets and a
boulagerie around every corner. Four hundred miles east of Madagascar,
Yugnon is a sort of Brancophone Hawaii. It's a magnet
for adrenaline junkies, known for its six hundred miles of

(01:31):
marked hiking trails, its zipline and whitewater rafting adventures, its
lava tube expeditions, and perfectly cresting surfing waves, as well
as the dubious distinction from a few years ago of
registering the most fatal shark attacks in the world per capita.
But beyond the plunging waterfalls and palm tree lined lagoons

(01:54):
hides another story about this far flung former colonial outposts
agricultural history in the beginnings of all things of the
modern trade in vanilla, the supremely fragrant bean that is
among spices second only to saffron in value on the
global market. In fact, the vanilla plant's natural habitat is

(02:17):
the tropical forests of Mexico, where native bees fertilize the
big blooming white orchids. The aspects who considered the plant
sacred mixed its dried seed pods into a cold cocoa
drink chocolato, as Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes discovered when he
arrived at Tanachetitlan in the early sixteenth century. European aristocrats

(02:43):
developed a taste for vanilla after it arrived from Spain's
colonies in the New World on ships loaded with looted
gold and silver. Eventually, a variation on the Aztec's cocoa drink,
now served hot with added sugar and milk, took off
across the continent, soon spreading to the distant corners of
the French Empire. I came to Reillugnon to explore the

(03:08):
roots of Vanilla's ensuing global commercial success. I arrived at
the beginning of the island's southern hemisphere winter, after the
torrential rains had subsided, and before the July and August
vacation rush. Fresh off the plain, I met Eric Jennings,
an author and historian specializing in French colonial history, for lunch.

(03:33):
The arrival of vanilla beans and their consumption is tied
to Europeans basically duplicating indigenous drinks from Central America. Sennings
told me the French felt particularly hard for vanilla Jennings explained,
mixing it into a growing variety of sweets, including a
frozen custard that are known today as ice cream, that

(03:55):
had been introduced by Catherine de Medici, according to legend,
when she married the future King Henry the Second of
France in fifteen thirty three. In seventeen eighty nine, Thomas
Jefferson returned home from his stint as the second U.
S Ambassador to France with such a love for vanilla
ice cream that he had it served at what would

(04:17):
later become the White House. Surferson's handwritten recipe, based on
that of French butler Adrianne Petti, is among his official
papers in the library of Congress. Sames, whose new book Vanilla,
The History of an Extraordinary Being will be published this summer,
was visiting Raignon for the fifth International Vanilla Congress, a

(04:41):
semi regular gathering drawing botanists, agricultural engineers, plant geneticists, and
vanilla growers and porters and distributors from around the world.
Talks focused on subjects such as climate change, the vanilla genome,
and vanilla market volatility. In one presentation, a Ugandan vanilla

(05:02):
grower showcased novel sustainable farming methods. In another the French
Agricultural research and International Development organization CYRAD led discussions on
a hybrid strain of vanilla that is resistant to Fusarium oxisporum,
the most common fungal blight threatening much of the world's

(05:23):
commercial crop. An historian at the University of Toronto who
spent a decade researching vanilla's cultural history and its global
economics spread, was one of the conference's keynote speakers. This
is not the first history of vanilla, but it is
the most academically rigorous, and at its center is an

(05:46):
unlikely hero whose story, although well known in the industry,
remains broadly overlooked. Born on Reigno to enslaved parents in
eighteen twenty nine, a child whose mother died while giving
birth was known simply as Edmund. Landowners didn't give last
names to those they enslaved. Edmund grew up on a

(06:08):
small plantation bellevue above the town of Sainte Suzan on
the island's north coast. The island was uninhabited when the
Portuguese first set foot on it in the early sixteenth century.
In sixteen forty two, the French claimed the island for
Louis the thirteenth Worked by enslaved captives transported from Africa, Madagascar,

(06:34):
and South Asia, dense forests soon became thriving coffee and
sugar plantations. Later, indentured workers from India and China took
over the grueling cultivation. The melting pot, Creole cuisine and
Creole language found on the island today are a legacy
of these successive waves of forced labor, a cultural mix

(06:58):
four hundred years in the minds. By the early nineteenth century,
enslaved people made up seventy percent of the island's population.
This was Edmond's childhood world. At Bellevue, the plantation's owner,
Fereo Bellier Beaumont was said to have treated him more

(07:19):
like a son than a slave. According to a letter
written by Bellier Beaumont's friend, a local official and botanist
named Auguste Lazier le Pervanche. Bellier Beaumont himself wrote of
his affection for Edmund and an eighteen sixty one letter
to the Sans Suzan Justice of the Peace. He was

(07:40):
my favorite and always at my side. Bellier Beaumont was
a horticulturist with a passion for rare plants, and he
taught Edmond from a young age the scientific names for
the trees and plants he grew on the property, though
he never taught him to read or write. In Bellevue
Garden was a single vine of vanilla planifolia native to

(08:03):
Mexico that Jennings believes descended from one of the first
vanilla saplings to survive on the island after a shipment
arrived from Paris in eighteen twenty two. By then, the
French had been struggling for years to break the Spanish
monopoly on what had become a licrative spice planting vanilla
in the tropical outposts of their own empire, but with

(08:27):
no natural pollinators, every attempt to produce beans had failed.
At Bellevue, Bellier Beaumonts vanilla vine grew beautiful flowers, but
it never bore fruit. That all changed one day in
eighteen forty one, when Edmund, then twelve years old, approached
a blooming vanilla orchid and nimbly peeled back the lip

(08:50):
of the flower to reveal the pollen inside with the
help of a needle or a sliver of wood. The
historical record is unclear he nudged back the rostelle, with
thin membrane separating the male anther from the female stigma.
Hooking around further, he pressed the two parts together. Months later,

(09:11):
Bellier Beaumont, accompanied by Edmond, was surprised to discover a
green vanilla bean dangling from the spot where that flower
had been. Walking with my faithful companion, I noticed on
the only vanilla plant I still had a well tied bean,
Bellier Beaumont wrote years later. I was astonished and told

(09:34):
him so. He said it was he who had pollinated
the flower. Bellier Beaumont was incredulous, but two or three
days later he noticed another bean on the vine. Edmond
now showed him what he'd done. Vanilla in that period
was only cultivated in a few amateur gardens as a

(09:56):
plant of pure curiosity. Mezier Le Parvont wrote, Edmund, with
the sagacity only a botanist can appreciate, was able to
distinguish in the abnormal flower of the vanilla plant the
organs of fertilization that are different from those of flowers
in general, and noticed very judiciously that the failure of

(10:18):
the ovary resulted from the fact that the sexual organs
were separated by a veil, and he had the idea
to lift it. Today, the vast majority of the world's
commercially cultivated vanilla plants are hand pollinated using Edmond's pioneering technique.
Le Jesse des Mond Edmund's gesture as they took to

(10:40):
calling it on Raignon. A skilled grower can pollinate fifteen
hundred flowers in a day using his method. The process
has yet to be mechanized. After Edmund shared his discovery,
Bellier Beaumont paraded him proudly around the island, offering demonstrations
to uthers their plantation owners. I have no way of

(11:02):
proving it, Jennings told me, But I've wondered many times
if Bellier Beaumont didn't charge attendance at these tours. Edmond
gets all this attention projected on him and becomes a
bit of a local star. Edmund's technique was quickly adopted,
enabling a new industry to take root. Soon, two growers

(11:25):
Ernest Lupi and Davie de Florie developed a system for
more efficiently processing fresh green vanilla beans, rather than simply
leaving them out in the sun to dry, as was
traditional in Mexico, they sped up the process by scalding
fresh beans and hot water to prevent them from ripening
further before drying them. Within twenty five years of Edmund's innovation,

(11:49):
Jennings said, Rayugnon becomes the global leader in vanilla. But
with increased production, Rayugnon's vanilla output more than tripled between
eighteen sixty and eighteen eighty, land and labor costs rose too,
and with a huge new market emerging in the United
States following the introduction of soft drinks Coca Cola debuted

(12:13):
in eighteen eighty six and ice cream cones invented in
New York City in eighteen ninety six, Yugnon's vanilla producers
began looking to Madagascar, the much larger and less developed
French colony next door, as an alternative growing site. Madagascar's

(12:33):
u vanilla growers found great success in the lush, humid
northeast coast of the island, where the vines attached their
aerial roots to shaded tree trunks and climbed toward the canopy.
It didn't take long for Madagascar to surpass Reillugnon as
the new world capital of vanilla, a position it's held

(12:54):
since the early twentieth century, and despite periods of political
instability in Madagascar, which gained independence from France in nineteen sixty,
as well as natural disasters, boom and bust growing cycles
tied to market speculation and competition from artificial vanilla. The
lab made iteration of vanilla's main flavor component, first identified

(13:18):
by a French scientist in eighteen fifty eight. Some eighty
percent of the world's vanilla is still grown in Madagascar today.
Back on Reiugnon, Edmund's story became the stuff of legend today.
Multiple streets bear his name, as well as several schools
on the island in Sans Dusanne, where he grew up.

(13:42):
Two memorials commemorate his contribution to botanical history. Novels in
a children's comic book have embellished the details of his life.
Of Bellevue itself, However, where Edmund pollinated that first vanilla orchid,
nothing remained, the property largely reclaimed by the forest. Only

(14:05):
a rudimentary monument on the side of a road stands
to mark the site. To get a sense of what
Bellevue might have looked like, I spent an afternoon visiting
villel one of the island's best preserved historic plantations, which
operates as a museum and memorial to slavery. The main

(14:26):
plantation house, completed in seventeen eighty eight, was home to
the Pannont, de Vasse and Vllel families wops. The house
sits perched on a hill above the sea, with cream
trim blue shutters and a manicured garden. It's a place
of memory where four hundred and seventy slaves died, not

(14:49):
from gunshots but exhaustion, said my guide Patrick Kuchen himself
descended from enslaved workers en re Lugnon. On a wall
in the entryway hung an enormous framed Dabasset family tree
extending across the centuries facing lines in Reiugnon and France.

(15:09):
The work of a slave was from three in the
morning until nine at night, Hukan continued. The only vacation
was when they slept farther inside. Among antique furniture, Chinese
porcelain and Baccarat crystal, candelabras, iron shackles, and framed plans
for a transport ship, the Lea Brooks were displayed. The

(15:32):
biggest cemetery of blacks of slaves, Where is that? Houkin asks,
the ocean, the seas of the world. The tour continued,
leading around a corner. Above the Dbasse's dining room table,
hung a portrait of Edmund as an adult, posing in
a white dinner jacket and bow tie, a vanilla vine

(15:55):
in one hand. The image, completed in eighteen sixty five three,
is a reproduction of a lithograph by a local artist,
Antoine Roussein, the inventor of the pollination of the vanilla
flower cocaine, said, pausing in front of the portrait, plenty
filled their pockets from his invention. Though published reports claimed

(16:19):
that Bellier Beaumont rewarded Edmond for his discovery by granting
his freedom, Jennings insists that never happened. Instead, he told
me Edmund remained in his master's charge until December twentieth,
eighteen forty eight, when abolition arrived. Reading the island's sixty

(16:40):
two thousand enslaved people. Edmund emancipated at nineteen, took a
last name for the first time, becoming Edmund Albius. Albus
is Latin for white, like the vanilla orchid. He had
hoped to secure a job as a cook on a
ship bound for France, but instead he went to work

(17:01):
in the home of a navy captain, earning fifteen francs
per month and ten pints of rice per week. According
to archival documents, one day in eighteen fifty one, items
were taken from his employer's home. On August nineteenth, Edmund
was arrested. According to official records from the time, Edmund

(17:23):
confessed to stealing a pair of silver bracelets out of
a Chinese casket, a small wallet, and a silver chain.
The public records don't include other incriminating evidence, making it
impossible to know definitively whether Edmund was guilty. He was
sentenced to five years of hard labor and forced to

(17:45):
pay the costs of his trial. Bellier Beaumont seated for leniency,
baraging the legal authorities with letters defending Edmund's character. The
frayed yelling letters are now in the partmental Archives in
Saint Denis. Edmond certainly has indisputable rights to public gratitude

(18:09):
and government clemency, he wrote in one letter sent to
the Prosecutor General in eighteen fifty five. The country is
indebted to him for a new branch of industry, though
Bellier Beaumont succeeded in getting Edmund released that year after
three years in prison. Edmund never benefited from the fortunes

(18:30):
his innovation produced. He moved back to San Suzan, working
odd jobs in agriculture and as a stonemason and a cook.
He never returned to vanilla production. In eighteen seventy one,
he married, but he was widowed five years later. He
died alone in eighteen eighty at the age of fifty one.

(18:53):
The very man who, at great profit to this colony,
discovered how to pollinate vanilla flowers has died, and the
public hospital at Saint Susan read his perfunctory obituary in
the local Rayugnon newspaper. It was a destitute and miserable end.
Raignon today is home to about one hundred and fifty

(19:16):
vanilla growers, a dramatic drop since the nineteen thirties when
several thousand black blanketed the island. Each operates outside the
global market, unable to keep pace with Madagascar and other
fruitful vanilla producing regions. Instead, Rayugnon growers almost exclusively serve

(19:37):
a local and tourist clientele, marketing their pods as luxury goods.
Late one morning on the edge of Sanusan, I met
Bertrand Combe, one such producer and an outspoken champion of
Yugnon vanilla. A native of the mountainous Boge region of France,

(19:57):
Combe came to Reyugnon as an agronomy student in nineteen
eighty seven, completing a thesis on vanilla blights, and never left.
I fell in love with vanilla, he said, I fell
in love with Rayugnon. The vanilla industry was already in
crisis when he arrived. After Rayugnon's co operative of vanilla

(20:19):
growers for which he initially worked failed in nineteen ninety five,
he helped create its replacement, Provania, becoming its director. Today,
Provenia operates as a sort of central processing facility, transforming
green vanilla from local farmers into cured black beans. In

(20:41):
two thousand nine, Combe opened his own picturesque vanilla business,
Le Vanillere, a tourist attraction on a historic estate, Le
Grand Azier, dating back to the sixteen seventies and still
active as a sugar plantation. Old quarters that housed in
slaved workers now used as offices for a local agricultural

(21:04):
organization lying the edge of the property. In front of
the old plantation house, newly restored but not yet open
to visitors, come planted vanilla vines on neat rows of
trees facing the sea, where ruined stables, also restored had been.
He built a gift shop selling vanilla beans, vanilla infused

(21:27):
jams and RUMs, and housemade vanilla ice cream for consuming
on the property. Given the price and potency of vanilla beans,
no Reyugnon producers offer tastings of pure vanilla on site.
Apart from one small yearly shipment to a boutique spice
business in France. Home sells all of his vanilla around

(21:50):
three hundred thousand dried beans annually here in his shop.
In twenty twenty four he received forty five thousand visitors,
plenty enough to sell out, particularly in a challenging growing
year when heavy rains and unusually high temperatures brought crop
yields way down. I had to close for a month

(22:12):
because I didn't have enough vanilla, he said. Home processes
his own vanilla, along with beans from some twenty five
other small growers across the island when the fresh green
beams come into his curing facility, open to visitors next
door to the gift shop. Comb plunges them into one

(22:33):
hundred and forty five degree water for three minutes to
kill them. The eshohdaje, or a scalding part of the process,
then wraps them in towels to steam for a day.
From there, they are laid outside in wood racks to
try in the sun for two weeks, then transferred to

(22:53):
wire racks inside, where they continue to dry out for
a couple more months. Finally, they're sealed up antique trunks
for another year or so to finish developing the aroma.
Comb explained, every batch is regularly checked and sorted to
ensure no mold has developed. Vanilla is not a lazy job. Unusually,

(23:18):
Comb marks the particular provenance of his vanilla beans, the
location on the island where each batch was grown, which
he sells at a premium in his shop at twenty
euros for a tube of three beans. Just as winemakers
talk of terroir, how the soil and location of the
grapevines affect a wine's flavor, Comb is convinced vanilla has

(23:41):
similar nuances. The notion is novel and controversial. Combe told
me when I was at Provenieux. All the growers were
against it. They said, if I have bad terroar, my
vanilla isn't going to sell as well. I'll have to
charge less. Home hopes to back up his theories with science.

(24:03):
He's enlisted a graduate student from the Serbonne in Paris
to analyze the aromatic molecules in vanilla grown in different
French territories in Rayugnon, New Caledonia, Tahiti, and Guadeloupe in
the Caribbean. His research is just beginning. The aroma of
vanilla has one hundred and eighty different molecules, Combe said,

(24:27):
the most important being Vanillan, but there are plenty of others.
Is this diversity that accounts for its particular taste. Home
is not alone among Raygnon's producers in striving to find
and sell vanilla's distinctive, if as yet unrecognized qualities. Louis

(24:48):
Leiitnig is a veteran vanilla grower whose family has been
on the island since the eighteenth century. One afternoon, we
climbed into his pick up truck for an off road
excursion to his ancestral lands, which hug the Pictonne de
la Fournees. Volcano near the commune of San Phelipe. Looks

(25:08):
like a character out of a rugged kipling story, with
an unruly white beard and a machette and a pith
helmet woven from dried screw pine leaves, a local handicraft material.
He grows his vines deep in the forest among wild
citrus and leechy trees. This is an old plantation, he said,

(25:29):
as we dug through the bush. The forest floor a
knotted tangle of roots all around us. Vanilla vines drenched
in light rain, climbed up palm trees. With a long stick.
He pulled a vine off a tree, whooping it back
on itself before tying it to the tree again, a
process known as bauflage. We're stressing the plant, he said.

(25:52):
It wants to climb up there to reach the light.
Here it's humid. It will flower on these vines we
brought down and then with pollinate them to have beans.
More than thirty years ago, when he started processing green vanilla,
hearing techniques were closely guarded by a few dominant players.
It was almost colonial, he said. We didn't have a

(26:15):
recipe to day like nig specializes in ultra premium vanilla,
a distinctive range of dried beans made with his own
proprietary curing techniques. For example, he sells fresh beans, a
style he helped pioneer that are only partially dried, the

(26:36):
additional water content making them extra plump. But his real
focus is frosted vanilla gibret in French, with such a
high concentration of vanillon that big white crystals, sparkling like snowflakes,
form along the outside of the bean as it dries.

(26:57):
The crystals are a natural phenomenon, feering unpredictably during the
curing process, but Leipnig has mastered a technique, his own
trade secret for bringing them out every time. We also
buy with our eyes, he explained. Frosted vanillas aromas were intense,

(27:19):
the appearance quite striking, and Leichnig described its flavors when
used in cooking as elegant and complex. The whole history
of vanilla comes from Reugnon and it continues. He said.
It's expensive to produce vanilla these days. We're not competitive,
so we're forced to deliver a different product, a product

(27:43):
of quality. This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for
to Day, your reader has been Rebecca Shore, thank you
for listening and have a great day.