This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

It's the most popular flavor in the world. It can be found in ice cream,

coffees, yogurt, and fruit dishes. It's used in skin care, fragrances, and household cleaners.

I'm talking, of course, about vanilla. But it wasn't always so. As a matter of fact, for the first few hundreds of years that we knew about this famous flavor,

it was considered an incredible luxury outside of its origin in Mexico, unavailable to the

common tongue, until one adolescent boy changed all of that. The vanilla orchid, or vanilla planophilia, if you're into science, is a native of Mexico.

It produces a delicate pod that, after curing, gives us the aromatic beans with that famous flavor.

It was cultivated for centuries in Mexico, first by the Tetonic people, and was later exploited by

the Spanish during the brutal days of the conquistadors, and it quickly became a hit

with European royalty. The problem with that, at least so far as Europe was concerned,

was that while the orchid could be grown in any environment, it would only produce the vanilla

beans in its native habitat.

And this all came down to one factor, the melipana bee, which could only be found in Mexico.

Essentially, without the bee to pollinate the blossom, the flower would wilt without producing

that prized seapod. And so for three long centuries after being brought to Europe,

it remained incredibly rare. No matter where they tried to grow it, the flower would produce no fruit.

That is, until 12-year-old Edmund Albius. Albius was born into slavery in 1829 on the French

...