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DID YOU KNOW?
FACTS & FICTION WITH A MEXICAN TWIST
MARCH 2005Did You Know That...
...Voladores and Vanilla vie for attention at the Vanilla Festival in Veracruz? The Vanilla Festival is held in early summer every year in Papantla, Veracruz. The origins of the festival pre-date the Spanish conquest. Its timing is now tied to the Catholic celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi (Body of Christ), sixty days after Easter.
Mark Trinko, an alert subscriber to Mexico Connect, has pointed out that Papantla locals say that the 2005 Vanilla Festival will be celebrated on May 19, a week earlier than the date given by the formula above. As for almost any festival in Mexico, anyone planning to time their visit to coincide with a particular festival is best advised to check ahead of time with a local hotel or tourist department.
Papantla is the heart of Mexico's vanilla-growing region. Vanilla, surely one of the world's best known flavors, if only on account of its ubiquitous use in ice-cream, comes from the seed pods of an orchid. The pods are about 20 centimeters in length and green when harvested. After careful and laborious drying and "sweating", these pods turn black. This caused Nahuatl-speaking Indians to name the plant tlilxóchitl (= black flower).
The orchid involved, Vanilla planifolia, grows as a thin vine... For commercial cultivation, hand pollination of each individual flower is essential. Until about fifty years ago, traditional growers of vanilla in the Papantla region relied on young maidens using small sticks or feathers to perform this task...
The early Spanish explorers were quick to appreciate the flavor of vanilla, and European demand for vanilla pods rose so much that some vanilla cultivators became suitably wealthy (see Vanilla: a Mexican native regains its reputation by Karen Hursh Graber).
Mexico maintained a monopoly on vanilla trade until...
© Copyright 2005 by Tony Burton. All rights reserved.
- Sombrero Books Page
Read the complete article . . .
Did You Know Index
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