The Spice Trail (2011) s01e03 Episode Script
Vanilla and Saffron
The world loves spice.
The exotic ingredients in so many of our favourite dishes have revolutionised the way we eat.
But the search for these amazing tastes, now found in every kitchen cupboard, changed the course of history.
This is a journey to find out how spices shaped our modern world.
I'm going to be visiting some of their exotic birthplaces, and travelling the globe to discover just how these spices made it to our tables.
THEY CHAN I'll be meeting the people whose lives depend on them and following the trail of the first spice explorers.
Empires built and destroyed, immense fortunes made and countless lives lost during one of the most exciting periods of discovery in the history of the western world - and all in the name of spice.
THEY CHAN Go on! Go for it! The two most highly prized spices in the modern world have spread around the globe in the wake of some of the world's greatest conquests.
I'll be following the trail of saffron - or red gold - from Morocco to Spain, in the footsteps of the Moorish Empire.
And from Spain to the New World, to discover how Mexican vanilla became one of the world's favourite tastes.
My journey begins here in Morocco's High Atlas mountains, where I'm hoping to uncover the story of a spice that Alexander the Great used as shampoo, and Cleopatra bathed in.
Celebrated in the Bible, it's so ancient its origins are unclear.
But today, it's best known for being the most expensive spice in the world.
It's saffron.
But why is it so costly? How can a simple ingredient really cost a staggering ã4,000 a kilo? Well, this is a good place to find out.
This is the centre of the saffron-farming region here in Morocco.
And every Wednesday all the farmers come down from their farms and little villages and settlements in the mountains around here to the market to sell their produce.
And what's unique, I think, in Morocco about this market is there's not a tourist in sight.
There's no-one pressing me to buy a carpet or to have a cup of tea.
It's just the real deal.
My goodness! C'est comme une monstre.
Un dinosaur! It's an extraordinary market, this.
You can buy everything from dried-up reptiles to dates to fish sandwiches.
But what I haven't seen is any saffron, yet we're right in the heart of Morocco's saffron-growing region.
I'm hoping that a little local knowledge will help me track it down.
Mahfoud Mohiydine's family has been in the saffron business for generations.
Ah, you are welcome.
Look at the colour of that.
So, this is from saffron? Yes, yes.
Saffron tea.
You can see.
Look at the colour of that! It's red gold.
Red gold.
It is! It is like red gold.
Yes.
So this is it - saffron.
It's the stigma, the inner part, of a tiny purple crocus.
Good colour, but the smell is unusual.
It's like, erm It smells sort of smoky, it smells sort of like honey.
I can't But I can't describe it.
Shall we taste? Saha.
Saha.
Good to meet you.
Saha.
Oh, that was delicious.
Yeah, delicious.
I'm going to like this saffron journey, I think.
It's going to be a good journey of discovery.
Thank you, I am happy.
Saffron has been grown and sold by the Berber people in this area for thousands of years.
The market now is really filling up, getting busy.
Yes, yes.
But I still can't see any on sale.
Spices? Yeah.
Saffron here? No.
Saffron? No, no, no.
No, impossible, no.
Don't say I'm mad - this is supposed Would you like to see saffron? Of course! I came here to see! Yes, come, come.
Yes, here.
The saffron is here.
THEY EXCHANGE PLEASANTRIES You can see.
Goodness! Yes, it's good saffron.
So you keep it hidden away? Yes, yes.
'Saffron is famed not just for its taste, but its colour.
'As this simple test shows, this is top quality saffron.
' So this is how you know it's good? Yes.
Say I want to buy, like, this much? Yes, it's five grams.
Is everyone gathering round because I look like I'm buying a lot? Yes.
Five grams of saffron is how much? 200 Dirham.
Yes.
About ã20, for five grams.
Yes.
Yes.
So if I buy saffron He knows everybody in this market - absolutely everybody.
So, are you selling saffron? Yes, yes, yes.
He's selling it.
Yes, yes.
A-ha.
You are a saffron farmer? You would like to see saffron flower? Of course, yes.
Is it possible? In the garden, yes.
I'd love to.
I've heard they have garden of saffron.
Can I come to your farm and see it? Ahmed lives just a few kilometres from the market, in an area that seems too barren to grow anything.
Oh, Ahmed, you live in a beautiful place.
Yes.
Look at that! The garden saffron is here.
This is your garden down here? Yes.
HE SPEAKS THE LOCAL LANGUAGE It's like a small, eroasis.
Yes, yes, small.
In the middle of all this dry landscape.
Because the saffron, they like the dry climate.
It likes the dry climate? Yes, every family has the garden of saffron.
Really? Everyone will grow it in this region? Yes.
I never imagined that in a harsh landscape like this, you could grow such delicate little flowers.
This is a saffron flower.
So, this is what you mean? Yes.
This is like my crocuses at home - it's the same.
OK, without But without the The crucial difference is this - the bright red stigma, the female parts of the plant, which, dried, become saffron.
And then you have to remove this by hand? Yes.
Every single flower? Yes, yes.
That's so much work.
Ahmed comes from a long line of saffron farmers.
Their knowledge and skill, passed down through the generations, their secret is the irrigation of their fields.
There's a pile of sheep dung in each one.
And as the water comes in, that spreads out the dung, so he fertilises and waters the field at the same time.
It's genius.
If we looked at this landscape, we'd think, "Nothing can grow here.
It's completely barren.
" Yeah.
And yet, the Berber make it a Garden of Eden.
Yes.
A garden of saffron.
It's amazing.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
Very good.
'Ahmed dries and stores his saffron in a special room in his house.
'He sells some of it immediately, but he will also keep some by.
' This is the saffron? This is the bank Last year.
This is last year's? Last year.
Last year's savings account? Yes.
Yes, for security.
Absolutely.
If one mother or family is ill If someone has to go to hospital, this is like your insurance? MAHFOUD TRANSLATES Do you want to give yourself a saffron hit? I like.
I can tell.
Most of today's farmers keep their saffron safe in padlocked metal boxes.
But one nearby village does things on a much grander scale.
Mahfoud and I are climbing up to see an ancient storehouse for the villagers' valuables.
SHE GASPS AND CHUCKLES I was not expecting that! My goodness! That's not a store house - that's a castle for saffron! It's beautiful.
Beautiful, huh? It looks impenetrable.
Mm.
It's amazing.
Not much is stored here now, but the sheer size of this fortress-like complex is impressive.
Built over many centuries, it shows just how precious saffron has always been.
How does this work? This is the box.
Box, more box.
So, every little wooden door is like someone's safe, like a bank vault? Yes, saffron, honey, money, all Anything that is valuable.
Yes, yes.
The door is small The door is small .
.
but the cave, it's big.
But the cave is big.
It's a Berber Fort Knox.
Yeah! THEY CHUCKLE What an idea - I love it! I feel like I'm in Indiana Jones.
What must it be like to live in a landscape like this? Impressiono, huh? Oh! Ah, oui! And all for saffron! Ah, oui! All because people want to store some bits of flowers safely.
Yes.
There's a magic hour to pick saffron.
It's just after dawn, when the morning dew has evaporated, and before the flowers wither.
I've joined Ahmed's extended family on their daily walk to work.
You start to appreciate why saffron is so expensive.
It is ridiculously labour intensive, and I can't even see how you could mechanise any part of this.
Are you stealing my flowers? You are, aren't you? Each saffron bulb produces four flowers, one at a time, over five or six days.
Harvesting will go on for about a month, and then it's all over until next year.
It takes an astonishing 200, 000 flowers to yield just a single kilogram of saffron, worth up to ã4,000.
But even if Ahmed's family could pick that amount, they would be lucky to see a quarter of that price.
In a good year, saffron provides just enough for Ahmed's family to live on, with a little left over to put in his store room.
This field behind me was totally purple, and every single flower has gone.
Only for that magic to happen again tomorrow morning, and there will be more flowers.
Let me see, have you got? Ah, look, we've got, look, this is a sign of a saffron picker.
We've both got purple fingers.
It means good? SHE SPEAKS HER OWN LANGUAGE Once all the morning's flowers are picked, we return to Ahmed's house for the next job Salam alaikum.
Salam alaikum.
.
.
separating the precious stigmas from the flowers.
So, I go like this? Like that And just pull.
Yeah.
Ah, OK.
Show me how to do this.
You just get the feeling that this scene could almost be exactly the same as 1,000 years ago.
Encore, encore! THEY SING After saffron plucking, I joined the women preparing the evening meal.
Almost everything we're going to eat tonight was grown in Ahmed's fields, including, of course, the saffron.
There's quite a lot of saffron going in here.
It's beautiful, so, does this go in the couscous? Couscous.
While everything's cooking, the women decide I look far too unladylike, and set about transforming me with traditional Berber dress and saffron make-up.
So, Adija is grinding up the saffron to a powder.
It's very soothing, like It feels like .
.
she's putting dots all over my face.
You've made me look like a princess.
Suitably dressed, I join the family to eat the spice that is so intrinsic to their way of life.
I think, for the first time in my life, I can actually taste saffron.
And it tastes really unusual, but undeniably exotic taste, it's just wonderful.
MUSIC HE SINGS The tradition of Saffron-growing here hasn't changed for centuries.
In the year 711 the Berbers carried these traditions north when they crossed the Mediterranean to conquer Spain.
They took their customs, their Islamic religion and their Saffron bulbs.
And so it's Spain that I'm heading to next.
The Berbers sailed from Africa across the Straits of Gibraltar and pushed deep into the heart of Spain.
The Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula took only seven years to complete, but was to last over seven centuries.
The new Berber rulers became known as Moors and their traditions and sense of taste travelled with them.
This is La Mancha, a huge swathe of flat land 100 kilometres south of Madrid.
It's famous for two things.
It was the setting of Spain's best known novel Don Quixote, but it's also the centre of Spanish saffron production.
Just like in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, the cold winters and hot summers here suited Saffron well.
La Mancha became known as the saffron capital of the world.
The town of Consuegra, in the heart of La Mancha, comes alive every year during the saffron picking season.
There are lots of people queuing over there.
The town plays host to a three-day festival to celebrate the harvest of saffron.
I think everybody is queuing for the classic Spanish dish.
It is, of course, paella and it has saffron in it, a good one does anyway.
Que bueno.
OK.
SHE SPEAKS SPANISH OK.
Y azafran? What we have here is a typical dish of the region, a mixture of peppers, tomatoes and there are strands of saffron in here.
Me gusta.
It's delicious.
As in Morocco, the saffron farms here are largely family owned but during the harvest, the people of the town always lend a hand separating the stigmas from the flowers.
OK, ladies.
IN SPANISH This one stays here like this, break this off, open this up.
I'm not moving my hand.
Like that.
How do you ladies spend your days? Because you're old.
You're not much older than me.
Do you all like saffron? Do you cook with it at home? Wow.
Such was the value of Saffron the women here are telling me unless you were known to have a healthy store of the spice no-one would agree to marry you.
It may not be such a consideration these days but saffron is still an intrinsic part of life in this region of Spain.
You can see who's been working the hardest and it's not me.
These sleepy towns in La Mancha are one of the world's biggest centres of trade in saffron.
As well as growing it, they import the spice from all over the globe from countries like India and Iran.
And there are no shortage of experts who can detect which saffron comes from where.
I've joined thirty saffron Sherlocks in a blind tasting, to tell the best from the rest.
This is a competition to try and establish the difference between saffrons.
One of these four samples is the best, it's from La Mancha.
One of them is apparently from Iran.
It's one of those foreign impostors.
Everyone looks knowledgeable.
The good ones should smell fruity and humid, whereas the old ones will smell rancid.
Look at the colour of that.
It looks old and orangey-yellow and a bit dead.
OK.
I don't know.
Can you imagine I'll be drummed out of town if like the Iranian one best! I'm going for number four as the good stuff.
The results are in.
Oops, I got it incredibly wrong so now I'm going to have to leave town.
It's been great fun testing my saffron taste buds but protecting the quality of saffron is a serious business.
Anything that sells for up to ã4,000 per kilo is going to inspire imitation.
I'm on the way to the University of Albacete where scientists are trying to establish how to tell pure saffron from some often very sophisticated fakes.
Wow! Are these like your children? Almost.
Professor Jose Antonio Perez is studying the plant's DNA and he shows me some examples of the way imitations that are sold as pure saffron are anything but.
Because saffron is so expensive, it's been mixed with many things, different plants.
That one is not saffron.
Even I, in my beginner's status, can tell this isn't saffron.
It looks like a dried flower petal.
This is another plant which sometimes That's turmeric.
Turmeric, that's right.
So they will mix turmeric with saffron.
They could do.
It can be ground up bits of coloured plastic and you wouldn't know.
Sometimes it is.
It could be plastic? It could be plastic, it could be organic or not organic material.
We could all be sprinkling bits of coloured plastic on our food and never know? Exactly.
Why would they do that? Because these materials are very cheap.
The pure saffron is very expensive, so it is very simple.
But some of the fakes are so very sophisticated, made from plants that are chemically almost identical to Saffron, that it's only by testing their DNA that Professor Perez and his team can tell the fake from the real thing.
What Martina is doing now is DNA fingerprinting of saffron.
DNA? DNA fingerprinting.
We should do something practical, our approach is practical science.
We are trying to help because it is our duty.
All these things have to be done otherwise we will not be sure of having saffron for the next 4,000 years.
But fakery doesn't just affect the saffron trade.
It has a knock on effect wherever the spice is used.
Manolo de la Ossa is a celebrated local chef with a passion for real Saffron.
So you use quite You want me to do that.
This is completely chemical? In Manolo's opinion, saffron-coloured powder can and will never be a substitute for true La Mancha saffron.
In here is this wonderful Manolo described it as a sort of broth, but it's like a stew, really, it's absolutely thick with meat.
It smells amazing.
What's amazing is that from all that cooking, you really smell the saffron coming out.
That's amazing.
I promise you, never will I use turmeric instead of saffron.
The saffron trail leads from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco to the plains of Spain and beyond.
In La Mancha, the joyful celebrations of the saffron harvest mask a hard truth.
Fake saffron threatens the livelihoods of communities throughout the saffron-growing world.
But there are people prepared to fight to keep the integrity of the world's most expensive spice.
The Moors left their mark here in Spain, influencing both food and architecture.
But by the late 1400s, Moorish power had diminished.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were ruling a newly united Spain.
After kicking out the Moors, they too wanted to spread their influence to lands beyond their borders.
It was they who sponsored the explorations that would find a whole new world and a new spice hitherto entirely unknown in Europe.
The Spanish fleet was sent westward in search of the fabled Spice Islands.
It was entirely the wrong direction.
They failed to find the Spice Islands, but they did discover the lands that were to become known as the Americas, and with them came a whole new source of exotic tastes.
This coast in Mexico is where one of the most infamous of the Spanish invaders landed.
It was 1519, and Hernan Cortes was the man with his eye on a spice fortune.
The people who lived here, in the city of Quiahuitzlan, eyed his arrival with suspicion.
These ancient ruins are not Aztec or Mayan - they're actually Totonac, and it was the Totonac people that totally dominated this region of Mexico before and during the time that Cortes first arrived here.
It was the Totonac people of this city who were among the first to be aware of Cortes's arrival, because when he did come here, he anchored his ships on that tiny rock out there.
The people Cortes met on his arrival here were the guardians of an exotic spice totally unknown to the Europeans or the Arab traders who had kept the taste buds of Europe tingling for centuries with spices like pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
This was something entirely new.
It wasvanilla.
The Totonac farmed and cured vanilla as a medicine and a perfume for their temples, and Totonac cities like this were spread all along the coast of Veracruz.
One of the biggest was here, in the very heart of the vanilla-growing area.
This city, El Tajin, was once a major Totonac centre where vanilla would have been used as a currency.
It had an enormous value even back then, largely because the Totonac believed it was sacred.
And here's why.
There once lived a princess called Morning Star, and she was so beautiful and pure of spirit it was decreed that she should never be possessed by a mortal man.
Unfortunately a young man named Running Deer ignored that decree, fell madly in love with her and she clearly did with him because they ran away together.
The high priests were furious, set off in hot pursuit, and when they found them, they put them to death immediately.
And on the spot where their blood was spilled a plant grew up - you guessed it, a vanilla vine.
When the beans ripened, the scent was deemed to be so exquisite it could only be the embodiment of the pure spirit of the princess.
Don't forget that, next time you're having a bowl of ice-cream.
Nearby is the city of Papantla.
It is the centre of the vanilla-growing business in Mexico and some of the people living here are Totonac, direct descendents of the tribe that Cortes first encountered.
Totonac vanilla, the real thing.
Not so long ago, these streets were covered in vanilla.
This film, shot in Papantla in 1923, shows vanilla pods being left out to dry in the sun.
So famous was the city for its sweet-smelling vanilla that Papantla became known as "the city that perfumed the world.
" Just a few miles outside Papantla lie the lush tropical forests where vanilla still grows today.
Jose Luis Hernandez has been growing vanilla all his life and he's an enthusiast for the original Totonac ways of cultivating the spice.
Oh, my goodness! I just had no idea it was going to look like that.
It looks like a mad, primeval vine.
It's amazing.
These are the beans? Si.
So this is what it looks like.
For hundreds of years, up until the 19th century, vanilla could only grow in this region.
And here is the reason - one tiny little insect unique to this part of the world.
It's called the melipona bee, and it's the sole pollinator of the vanilla flower.
So when a flower comes out, the little bee pollinates the flower and then the flower dies and the fruit begins to grow.
Si, exactamente.
Wow! Vanilla takes a very long time to grow.
From the appearance of the first flower to the harvest of the vanilla pod takes nine months.
I've arrived after the flowering season, so I'm not expecting to be able to see a vanilla flower.
Is that a flower about to come? Si, exactamente.
But this is completely out of season! You Mexicans! You're so charming! HE SPEAKS SPANISH And you think it could flower tomorrow? Si, manana.
Will you call me? Si! We might see a vanilla rocket! That would be amazing! I feel like I've had a morning of complete revelation.
Who would have guessed that it has to be pollinated by one particular tiny species of bee, and only then can those beans grow? What is without doubt is that vanilla is definitely Mexican.
In fact, it's definitely Totonac.
It comes from this region.
It is absolutely rooted here, and I feel that I have actually come to the very birthplace of vanilla.
30 metres above the ground in Papantla are five Totonac men about to take part in a spectacular ritual.
It's a call to their gods to help ensure a good crop of vanilla.
Oh, my goodness, look at them! They're now doing a fertility dance, a sort of ritual dance to their fertility god.
Way back when, there was a huge drought here and it looked like the whole vanilla crop was going to be devastated, which of course would have destroyed the region.
So some Totonac men got together and said, "What do we need to do to make it rain? "We need to do something spectacular to inspire our fertility god to make it rain.
" And this - this! - is what they came up with.
The Spanish invader Cortes would have been the first European to witness this spectacle.
But he had his eye on a higher prize.
The legend of El Dorado spoke of untold amounts of gold, and Cortes was determined to find it.
He headed inland in search of the most powerful ruler in Mexico.
Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs.
And Montezuma welcomed Cortes with a drink that he felt was fit for a king.
It was cacao, chocolate, flavoured with our old friend vanilla.
And Cortes became the very first European to taste that most aromatic of spices.
Cortes wasted no time in shipping this exotic spice back to Spain, little knowing he was introducing Europe to a taste that today has become ubiquitous and hugely popular the world over.
Jose Luis? Donde estas? Hola.
Vamos! OK, OK.
It happened? Si.
Yeah? So exciting! HE SPEAKS SPANISH Oh, it's beautiful! It's just such an astonishing colour.
Si.
It's like fresh! It's an extraordinary piece of luck to see a vanilla orchid bloom out of season.
But if the secret to the success of growing vanilla lies with the little melipona bee that only exists here, how did vanilla ever grow outside Mexico? Well, this chap is the reason.
His name was Edmond Albius, and in 1841 he was a 12-year-old slave boy living on an estate in Reunion, then a French colony in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Madagascar.
Now, at that time, his master, like so many others, was desperately trying to cultivate vanilla.
The vines would grow beautifully in hot tropical climates like that, but what they couldn't get to happen was for them to flower on any regular basis.
Well, one day Edmond was wandering around his master's estate when he happened across a vanilla flower and he discovered somehow that if he fiddled with it in a certain way, he could pollinate it and it worked.
It produced a bean.
He managed to work out how to pollinate it.
And this is how he did it.
So are you going to pollinate this now? HE SPEAKS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE Jose Luis uses a sliver of wood, just as Edmond Albius did, to move a membrane aside before pollinating the plant.
Jose Luis brushes the pollen on the tip of the stick across the stigma to fertilize the flower.
So what Jose has just done is basically the work of the bee, and brought the male and female parts of the plant together, so it's now fertilised.
I can't believe how lucky we have been.
What a day! You're amazing.
HE SPEAKS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE Discovering how to hand pollinate vanilla was a major breakthrough, but it was the beginning of the end for Mexico's monopoly on the world's supply of the spice.
In less than a hundred years, the island of Madagascar was producing more vanilla than Mexico.
Now little more than 1% of the world's vanilla comes from Mexico.
Hi.
Thank you so much 'Norma Gaya runs one of the oldest vanilla companies in the country.
'Here, after months of curing, the vanilla is graded according to quality.
' We store it here in these boxes Since my great-grandfather, we use the same system.
Wow.
'The best vanilla pods are valued for their rich flavour, aroma and amount of vanillin oil.
' This is naturally.
You can see the crystals.
Oh, yeah, I can see! Very good thing.
The smell! These crystals have a lot of vanillin content.
So it's the vanillin, the content, that makes it valuable, isn't it? I mean, the smell of it is like It doesn't smell like any vanilla I've ever smelt before.
No.
It smells like It smells like alcohol.
I'm feeling a little bit drunk, just smelling it! But what I don't understand, Norma, is why are you producing only a fraction of the world's vanilla? Because people, they don't know that the vanilla is from Mexico, and the vanilla grows here in the Totonac area.
So most of the natural vanilla goes outside of Mexico.
Does that mean that, basically, people like the Totonac farmers - the traditional vanilla growers - have stopped growing? Yes.
So it seems that not only have Mexicans lost interest in vanilla, but the world's traders themselves have turned to other countries with lower labour costs to acquire the spice.
Madagascar and Indonesia have become the places for vanilla.
Mexico has been left behind.
'Jose Manuel Rodriguez is a vanilla exporter 'only too aware of the seriousness of the situation.
' Is there a danger that Mexican vanilla could become extinct? Unfortunately, I would have to say yes.
If things don't change, if producers, farmers, keep getting so disappointed about what they get for their vanilla, and the global market stays so low, they will just stop producing it.
But there is still hope.
Jose is one of a new wave of Mexicans hoping to convince a growing gourmet market that all the work involved in producing the original Mexican vanilla really does make it a product worth rediscovering.
Like saffron, it's amongst the most labour-intensive crops in the world, taking about 18 months of care from the point of pollination to the dried and cured finished spice.
When you smell and touch the vanilla, if you have been in touch with other vanillas, most of the time, you recognise directly the quality.
Then again, it is a matter of what's behind our vanilla.
It's not just the production of a spice, it is the origin of it.
All that which comes behind, all that knowledge from thousands of years, I would try to appeal to you that this is not just vanilla, this is Mexican vanilla.
This is the vanilla the world fell in love with.
'And that seems to be the point.
'The craft of vanilla production is so important to the Totonac way of life, 'its loss would mean the demise of an essential part of their heritage.
' It smells lovely.
So how do the new vanilla enthusiasts get the word out? To find out, I'm on my way to one of the largest cities in the world.
So I've left very early this morning, with the indefatigable Don Jose at the wheel.
Todo bien? Todo bien.
Good, everything is good.
And that's great, because we've got a very long journey ahead of us.
Six to eight hours to get to Mexico City, and it's a long way from here.
22 million people live, work and eat in and around Mexico City.
And in one of its top restaurants, someone is trying to excite the taste buds of some of its more discerning citizens, with a little help from vanilla, of course! Gerardo Vasquez, the chef of this restaurant, is renowned for reintroducing Mexicans to the ingredients that Mexico gave to the world.
I'm starving already just standing here! I just want to try everything.
But what I need to ask you about is vanilla.
We have lost our touch with the traditional ingredients.
Vanilla always has been expensive.
So it was more valuable to people in Mexico to sell it rather than, really, to eat it? Yes, of course.
It became so popular in Europe, in the States, all over the world, and it became so precious.
It's a terrible thing to admit - here I am trying to discover everything about vanilla, and I have to confess to you (I hate it!) If you go out there, I will send you something.
OK.
And I hope you like it.
The taste that most of us associate with vanilla may be little more than a sweet spice.
But vanilla has a very complicated flavour, and Gerardo uses it in both sweet and savoury dishes.
Aha.
Oh! Ooh.
That smells amazing.
This is veal.
Veal? Mmm-hmm.
Now that You can't tell me vanilla's in there? Yes.
Of course.
It has a lot.
A lot? A lot.
All the tiny black points.
Yeah.
It's vanilla? It's vanilla.
But it's so delicious.
Geraldo may be making strides in cosmopolitan Mexico City, but it'll take more than a few a la carte recipes to create a whole new demand for real Totonac vanilla.
Hola! KATE SPEAKS IN SPANISH Buenos dias.
Marthe, hola! Buenos dias.
Put me to work! Put me to work.
'Here in another very different kind of kitchen is a group of Totonac women 'who are part of movement keeping the traditional uses of ingredients like vanilla alive.
'They call themselves "women in smoke" 'and their leader Marthe is determined to make sure 'these cooking skills and recipes get passed on to a new generation.
' OK, so now they're vanilla.
So you toast the vanilla as well? Si.
MARTHE SPEAKS IN SPANISH 'These toasted cocoa beans and vanilla pods are the key ingredients 'for probably the most historically significant drink in Mexico.
' Oh! Like the Aztecs gave to Cortes.
Si.
'It's the drink that Cortes first drank with Montezuma, 'the drink that sealed the fate of Mexico 500 years ago.
'It was a sweet taste for Cortes, but a bitter moment for Mexico.
'Within three years, Montezuma was dead 'and Spain had effectively conquered the country.
' There's the vanilla going in.
What? Oh, you need to wiggle? Si, si! ALL LAUGH AND SHOU You're a slave driver! ALL CHANT AND CHEER I love Totonac cooking! LAUGHTER You're not supposed to laugh at me, I'm trying! SHE SPEAKS IN HER OWN LANGUAGE Nu-uh.
LAUGHTER Oh.
Ooh! So the hot chocolate is ready.
It smells incredible.
It doesn't smell like the hot chocolate you and I know.
It smells like basically a whole bar has been melted into this cup.
And it just turns into a little cup of heaven.
Thank you.
Totonac hospitality.
Here's to it.
'I'm finishing my journey 'with the people who know this spice better than anyone - 'the people who were the original cultivators of a bean 'that was to become known throughout the world.
'It's a unique product with a culture and history 'as rich and unusual as its taste.
'There are many here in Mexico' who would love to see the production of vanilla return to its years of former glory.
There's Gerado the chef, the new generation of traders and producers, but most importantly, it's the Totonac people - the original vanilla people - their farmers and people like Marthe who believe that keeping the Totonac culture alive could ensure a future for Mexican vanilla.
And who knows? Maybe one day we'll be able to walk around our own supermarkets, pick out a vanilla bean that says on its label proudly, "Produce of Mexico.
"
The exotic ingredients in so many of our favourite dishes have revolutionised the way we eat.
But the search for these amazing tastes, now found in every kitchen cupboard, changed the course of history.
This is a journey to find out how spices shaped our modern world.
I'm going to be visiting some of their exotic birthplaces, and travelling the globe to discover just how these spices made it to our tables.
THEY CHAN I'll be meeting the people whose lives depend on them and following the trail of the first spice explorers.
Empires built and destroyed, immense fortunes made and countless lives lost during one of the most exciting periods of discovery in the history of the western world - and all in the name of spice.
THEY CHAN Go on! Go for it! The two most highly prized spices in the modern world have spread around the globe in the wake of some of the world's greatest conquests.
I'll be following the trail of saffron - or red gold - from Morocco to Spain, in the footsteps of the Moorish Empire.
And from Spain to the New World, to discover how Mexican vanilla became one of the world's favourite tastes.
My journey begins here in Morocco's High Atlas mountains, where I'm hoping to uncover the story of a spice that Alexander the Great used as shampoo, and Cleopatra bathed in.
Celebrated in the Bible, it's so ancient its origins are unclear.
But today, it's best known for being the most expensive spice in the world.
It's saffron.
But why is it so costly? How can a simple ingredient really cost a staggering ã4,000 a kilo? Well, this is a good place to find out.
This is the centre of the saffron-farming region here in Morocco.
And every Wednesday all the farmers come down from their farms and little villages and settlements in the mountains around here to the market to sell their produce.
And what's unique, I think, in Morocco about this market is there's not a tourist in sight.
There's no-one pressing me to buy a carpet or to have a cup of tea.
It's just the real deal.
My goodness! C'est comme une monstre.
Un dinosaur! It's an extraordinary market, this.
You can buy everything from dried-up reptiles to dates to fish sandwiches.
But what I haven't seen is any saffron, yet we're right in the heart of Morocco's saffron-growing region.
I'm hoping that a little local knowledge will help me track it down.
Mahfoud Mohiydine's family has been in the saffron business for generations.
Ah, you are welcome.
Look at the colour of that.
So, this is from saffron? Yes, yes.
Saffron tea.
You can see.
Look at the colour of that! It's red gold.
Red gold.
It is! It is like red gold.
Yes.
So this is it - saffron.
It's the stigma, the inner part, of a tiny purple crocus.
Good colour, but the smell is unusual.
It's like, erm It smells sort of smoky, it smells sort of like honey.
I can't But I can't describe it.
Shall we taste? Saha.
Saha.
Good to meet you.
Saha.
Oh, that was delicious.
Yeah, delicious.
I'm going to like this saffron journey, I think.
It's going to be a good journey of discovery.
Thank you, I am happy.
Saffron has been grown and sold by the Berber people in this area for thousands of years.
The market now is really filling up, getting busy.
Yes, yes.
But I still can't see any on sale.
Spices? Yeah.
Saffron here? No.
Saffron? No, no, no.
No, impossible, no.
Don't say I'm mad - this is supposed Would you like to see saffron? Of course! I came here to see! Yes, come, come.
Yes, here.
The saffron is here.
THEY EXCHANGE PLEASANTRIES You can see.
Goodness! Yes, it's good saffron.
So you keep it hidden away? Yes, yes.
'Saffron is famed not just for its taste, but its colour.
'As this simple test shows, this is top quality saffron.
' So this is how you know it's good? Yes.
Say I want to buy, like, this much? Yes, it's five grams.
Is everyone gathering round because I look like I'm buying a lot? Yes.
Five grams of saffron is how much? 200 Dirham.
Yes.
About ã20, for five grams.
Yes.
Yes.
So if I buy saffron He knows everybody in this market - absolutely everybody.
So, are you selling saffron? Yes, yes, yes.
He's selling it.
Yes, yes.
A-ha.
You are a saffron farmer? You would like to see saffron flower? Of course, yes.
Is it possible? In the garden, yes.
I'd love to.
I've heard they have garden of saffron.
Can I come to your farm and see it? Ahmed lives just a few kilometres from the market, in an area that seems too barren to grow anything.
Oh, Ahmed, you live in a beautiful place.
Yes.
Look at that! The garden saffron is here.
This is your garden down here? Yes.
HE SPEAKS THE LOCAL LANGUAGE It's like a small, eroasis.
Yes, yes, small.
In the middle of all this dry landscape.
Because the saffron, they like the dry climate.
It likes the dry climate? Yes, every family has the garden of saffron.
Really? Everyone will grow it in this region? Yes.
I never imagined that in a harsh landscape like this, you could grow such delicate little flowers.
This is a saffron flower.
So, this is what you mean? Yes.
This is like my crocuses at home - it's the same.
OK, without But without the The crucial difference is this - the bright red stigma, the female parts of the plant, which, dried, become saffron.
And then you have to remove this by hand? Yes.
Every single flower? Yes, yes.
That's so much work.
Ahmed comes from a long line of saffron farmers.
Their knowledge and skill, passed down through the generations, their secret is the irrigation of their fields.
There's a pile of sheep dung in each one.
And as the water comes in, that spreads out the dung, so he fertilises and waters the field at the same time.
It's genius.
If we looked at this landscape, we'd think, "Nothing can grow here.
It's completely barren.
" Yeah.
And yet, the Berber make it a Garden of Eden.
Yes.
A garden of saffron.
It's amazing.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
Very good.
'Ahmed dries and stores his saffron in a special room in his house.
'He sells some of it immediately, but he will also keep some by.
' This is the saffron? This is the bank Last year.
This is last year's? Last year.
Last year's savings account? Yes.
Yes, for security.
Absolutely.
If one mother or family is ill If someone has to go to hospital, this is like your insurance? MAHFOUD TRANSLATES Do you want to give yourself a saffron hit? I like.
I can tell.
Most of today's farmers keep their saffron safe in padlocked metal boxes.
But one nearby village does things on a much grander scale.
Mahfoud and I are climbing up to see an ancient storehouse for the villagers' valuables.
SHE GASPS AND CHUCKLES I was not expecting that! My goodness! That's not a store house - that's a castle for saffron! It's beautiful.
Beautiful, huh? It looks impenetrable.
Mm.
It's amazing.
Not much is stored here now, but the sheer size of this fortress-like complex is impressive.
Built over many centuries, it shows just how precious saffron has always been.
How does this work? This is the box.
Box, more box.
So, every little wooden door is like someone's safe, like a bank vault? Yes, saffron, honey, money, all Anything that is valuable.
Yes, yes.
The door is small The door is small .
.
but the cave, it's big.
But the cave is big.
It's a Berber Fort Knox.
Yeah! THEY CHUCKLE What an idea - I love it! I feel like I'm in Indiana Jones.
What must it be like to live in a landscape like this? Impressiono, huh? Oh! Ah, oui! And all for saffron! Ah, oui! All because people want to store some bits of flowers safely.
Yes.
There's a magic hour to pick saffron.
It's just after dawn, when the morning dew has evaporated, and before the flowers wither.
I've joined Ahmed's extended family on their daily walk to work.
You start to appreciate why saffron is so expensive.
It is ridiculously labour intensive, and I can't even see how you could mechanise any part of this.
Are you stealing my flowers? You are, aren't you? Each saffron bulb produces four flowers, one at a time, over five or six days.
Harvesting will go on for about a month, and then it's all over until next year.
It takes an astonishing 200, 000 flowers to yield just a single kilogram of saffron, worth up to ã4,000.
But even if Ahmed's family could pick that amount, they would be lucky to see a quarter of that price.
In a good year, saffron provides just enough for Ahmed's family to live on, with a little left over to put in his store room.
This field behind me was totally purple, and every single flower has gone.
Only for that magic to happen again tomorrow morning, and there will be more flowers.
Let me see, have you got? Ah, look, we've got, look, this is a sign of a saffron picker.
We've both got purple fingers.
It means good? SHE SPEAKS HER OWN LANGUAGE Once all the morning's flowers are picked, we return to Ahmed's house for the next job Salam alaikum.
Salam alaikum.
.
.
separating the precious stigmas from the flowers.
So, I go like this? Like that And just pull.
Yeah.
Ah, OK.
Show me how to do this.
You just get the feeling that this scene could almost be exactly the same as 1,000 years ago.
Encore, encore! THEY SING After saffron plucking, I joined the women preparing the evening meal.
Almost everything we're going to eat tonight was grown in Ahmed's fields, including, of course, the saffron.
There's quite a lot of saffron going in here.
It's beautiful, so, does this go in the couscous? Couscous.
While everything's cooking, the women decide I look far too unladylike, and set about transforming me with traditional Berber dress and saffron make-up.
So, Adija is grinding up the saffron to a powder.
It's very soothing, like It feels like .
.
she's putting dots all over my face.
You've made me look like a princess.
Suitably dressed, I join the family to eat the spice that is so intrinsic to their way of life.
I think, for the first time in my life, I can actually taste saffron.
And it tastes really unusual, but undeniably exotic taste, it's just wonderful.
MUSIC HE SINGS The tradition of Saffron-growing here hasn't changed for centuries.
In the year 711 the Berbers carried these traditions north when they crossed the Mediterranean to conquer Spain.
They took their customs, their Islamic religion and their Saffron bulbs.
And so it's Spain that I'm heading to next.
The Berbers sailed from Africa across the Straits of Gibraltar and pushed deep into the heart of Spain.
The Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula took only seven years to complete, but was to last over seven centuries.
The new Berber rulers became known as Moors and their traditions and sense of taste travelled with them.
This is La Mancha, a huge swathe of flat land 100 kilometres south of Madrid.
It's famous for two things.
It was the setting of Spain's best known novel Don Quixote, but it's also the centre of Spanish saffron production.
Just like in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, the cold winters and hot summers here suited Saffron well.
La Mancha became known as the saffron capital of the world.
The town of Consuegra, in the heart of La Mancha, comes alive every year during the saffron picking season.
There are lots of people queuing over there.
The town plays host to a three-day festival to celebrate the harvest of saffron.
I think everybody is queuing for the classic Spanish dish.
It is, of course, paella and it has saffron in it, a good one does anyway.
Que bueno.
OK.
SHE SPEAKS SPANISH OK.
Y azafran? What we have here is a typical dish of the region, a mixture of peppers, tomatoes and there are strands of saffron in here.
Me gusta.
It's delicious.
As in Morocco, the saffron farms here are largely family owned but during the harvest, the people of the town always lend a hand separating the stigmas from the flowers.
OK, ladies.
IN SPANISH This one stays here like this, break this off, open this up.
I'm not moving my hand.
Like that.
How do you ladies spend your days? Because you're old.
You're not much older than me.
Do you all like saffron? Do you cook with it at home? Wow.
Such was the value of Saffron the women here are telling me unless you were known to have a healthy store of the spice no-one would agree to marry you.
It may not be such a consideration these days but saffron is still an intrinsic part of life in this region of Spain.
You can see who's been working the hardest and it's not me.
These sleepy towns in La Mancha are one of the world's biggest centres of trade in saffron.
As well as growing it, they import the spice from all over the globe from countries like India and Iran.
And there are no shortage of experts who can detect which saffron comes from where.
I've joined thirty saffron Sherlocks in a blind tasting, to tell the best from the rest.
This is a competition to try and establish the difference between saffrons.
One of these four samples is the best, it's from La Mancha.
One of them is apparently from Iran.
It's one of those foreign impostors.
Everyone looks knowledgeable.
The good ones should smell fruity and humid, whereas the old ones will smell rancid.
Look at the colour of that.
It looks old and orangey-yellow and a bit dead.
OK.
I don't know.
Can you imagine I'll be drummed out of town if like the Iranian one best! I'm going for number four as the good stuff.
The results are in.
Oops, I got it incredibly wrong so now I'm going to have to leave town.
It's been great fun testing my saffron taste buds but protecting the quality of saffron is a serious business.
Anything that sells for up to ã4,000 per kilo is going to inspire imitation.
I'm on the way to the University of Albacete where scientists are trying to establish how to tell pure saffron from some often very sophisticated fakes.
Wow! Are these like your children? Almost.
Professor Jose Antonio Perez is studying the plant's DNA and he shows me some examples of the way imitations that are sold as pure saffron are anything but.
Because saffron is so expensive, it's been mixed with many things, different plants.
That one is not saffron.
Even I, in my beginner's status, can tell this isn't saffron.
It looks like a dried flower petal.
This is another plant which sometimes That's turmeric.
Turmeric, that's right.
So they will mix turmeric with saffron.
They could do.
It can be ground up bits of coloured plastic and you wouldn't know.
Sometimes it is.
It could be plastic? It could be plastic, it could be organic or not organic material.
We could all be sprinkling bits of coloured plastic on our food and never know? Exactly.
Why would they do that? Because these materials are very cheap.
The pure saffron is very expensive, so it is very simple.
But some of the fakes are so very sophisticated, made from plants that are chemically almost identical to Saffron, that it's only by testing their DNA that Professor Perez and his team can tell the fake from the real thing.
What Martina is doing now is DNA fingerprinting of saffron.
DNA? DNA fingerprinting.
We should do something practical, our approach is practical science.
We are trying to help because it is our duty.
All these things have to be done otherwise we will not be sure of having saffron for the next 4,000 years.
But fakery doesn't just affect the saffron trade.
It has a knock on effect wherever the spice is used.
Manolo de la Ossa is a celebrated local chef with a passion for real Saffron.
So you use quite You want me to do that.
This is completely chemical? In Manolo's opinion, saffron-coloured powder can and will never be a substitute for true La Mancha saffron.
In here is this wonderful Manolo described it as a sort of broth, but it's like a stew, really, it's absolutely thick with meat.
It smells amazing.
What's amazing is that from all that cooking, you really smell the saffron coming out.
That's amazing.
I promise you, never will I use turmeric instead of saffron.
The saffron trail leads from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco to the plains of Spain and beyond.
In La Mancha, the joyful celebrations of the saffron harvest mask a hard truth.
Fake saffron threatens the livelihoods of communities throughout the saffron-growing world.
But there are people prepared to fight to keep the integrity of the world's most expensive spice.
The Moors left their mark here in Spain, influencing both food and architecture.
But by the late 1400s, Moorish power had diminished.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were ruling a newly united Spain.
After kicking out the Moors, they too wanted to spread their influence to lands beyond their borders.
It was they who sponsored the explorations that would find a whole new world and a new spice hitherto entirely unknown in Europe.
The Spanish fleet was sent westward in search of the fabled Spice Islands.
It was entirely the wrong direction.
They failed to find the Spice Islands, but they did discover the lands that were to become known as the Americas, and with them came a whole new source of exotic tastes.
This coast in Mexico is where one of the most infamous of the Spanish invaders landed.
It was 1519, and Hernan Cortes was the man with his eye on a spice fortune.
The people who lived here, in the city of Quiahuitzlan, eyed his arrival with suspicion.
These ancient ruins are not Aztec or Mayan - they're actually Totonac, and it was the Totonac people that totally dominated this region of Mexico before and during the time that Cortes first arrived here.
It was the Totonac people of this city who were among the first to be aware of Cortes's arrival, because when he did come here, he anchored his ships on that tiny rock out there.
The people Cortes met on his arrival here were the guardians of an exotic spice totally unknown to the Europeans or the Arab traders who had kept the taste buds of Europe tingling for centuries with spices like pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
This was something entirely new.
It wasvanilla.
The Totonac farmed and cured vanilla as a medicine and a perfume for their temples, and Totonac cities like this were spread all along the coast of Veracruz.
One of the biggest was here, in the very heart of the vanilla-growing area.
This city, El Tajin, was once a major Totonac centre where vanilla would have been used as a currency.
It had an enormous value even back then, largely because the Totonac believed it was sacred.
And here's why.
There once lived a princess called Morning Star, and she was so beautiful and pure of spirit it was decreed that she should never be possessed by a mortal man.
Unfortunately a young man named Running Deer ignored that decree, fell madly in love with her and she clearly did with him because they ran away together.
The high priests were furious, set off in hot pursuit, and when they found them, they put them to death immediately.
And on the spot where their blood was spilled a plant grew up - you guessed it, a vanilla vine.
When the beans ripened, the scent was deemed to be so exquisite it could only be the embodiment of the pure spirit of the princess.
Don't forget that, next time you're having a bowl of ice-cream.
Nearby is the city of Papantla.
It is the centre of the vanilla-growing business in Mexico and some of the people living here are Totonac, direct descendents of the tribe that Cortes first encountered.
Totonac vanilla, the real thing.
Not so long ago, these streets were covered in vanilla.
This film, shot in Papantla in 1923, shows vanilla pods being left out to dry in the sun.
So famous was the city for its sweet-smelling vanilla that Papantla became known as "the city that perfumed the world.
" Just a few miles outside Papantla lie the lush tropical forests where vanilla still grows today.
Jose Luis Hernandez has been growing vanilla all his life and he's an enthusiast for the original Totonac ways of cultivating the spice.
Oh, my goodness! I just had no idea it was going to look like that.
It looks like a mad, primeval vine.
It's amazing.
These are the beans? Si.
So this is what it looks like.
For hundreds of years, up until the 19th century, vanilla could only grow in this region.
And here is the reason - one tiny little insect unique to this part of the world.
It's called the melipona bee, and it's the sole pollinator of the vanilla flower.
So when a flower comes out, the little bee pollinates the flower and then the flower dies and the fruit begins to grow.
Si, exactamente.
Wow! Vanilla takes a very long time to grow.
From the appearance of the first flower to the harvest of the vanilla pod takes nine months.
I've arrived after the flowering season, so I'm not expecting to be able to see a vanilla flower.
Is that a flower about to come? Si, exactamente.
But this is completely out of season! You Mexicans! You're so charming! HE SPEAKS SPANISH And you think it could flower tomorrow? Si, manana.
Will you call me? Si! We might see a vanilla rocket! That would be amazing! I feel like I've had a morning of complete revelation.
Who would have guessed that it has to be pollinated by one particular tiny species of bee, and only then can those beans grow? What is without doubt is that vanilla is definitely Mexican.
In fact, it's definitely Totonac.
It comes from this region.
It is absolutely rooted here, and I feel that I have actually come to the very birthplace of vanilla.
30 metres above the ground in Papantla are five Totonac men about to take part in a spectacular ritual.
It's a call to their gods to help ensure a good crop of vanilla.
Oh, my goodness, look at them! They're now doing a fertility dance, a sort of ritual dance to their fertility god.
Way back when, there was a huge drought here and it looked like the whole vanilla crop was going to be devastated, which of course would have destroyed the region.
So some Totonac men got together and said, "What do we need to do to make it rain? "We need to do something spectacular to inspire our fertility god to make it rain.
" And this - this! - is what they came up with.
The Spanish invader Cortes would have been the first European to witness this spectacle.
But he had his eye on a higher prize.
The legend of El Dorado spoke of untold amounts of gold, and Cortes was determined to find it.
He headed inland in search of the most powerful ruler in Mexico.
Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs.
And Montezuma welcomed Cortes with a drink that he felt was fit for a king.
It was cacao, chocolate, flavoured with our old friend vanilla.
And Cortes became the very first European to taste that most aromatic of spices.
Cortes wasted no time in shipping this exotic spice back to Spain, little knowing he was introducing Europe to a taste that today has become ubiquitous and hugely popular the world over.
Jose Luis? Donde estas? Hola.
Vamos! OK, OK.
It happened? Si.
Yeah? So exciting! HE SPEAKS SPANISH Oh, it's beautiful! It's just such an astonishing colour.
Si.
It's like fresh! It's an extraordinary piece of luck to see a vanilla orchid bloom out of season.
But if the secret to the success of growing vanilla lies with the little melipona bee that only exists here, how did vanilla ever grow outside Mexico? Well, this chap is the reason.
His name was Edmond Albius, and in 1841 he was a 12-year-old slave boy living on an estate in Reunion, then a French colony in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Madagascar.
Now, at that time, his master, like so many others, was desperately trying to cultivate vanilla.
The vines would grow beautifully in hot tropical climates like that, but what they couldn't get to happen was for them to flower on any regular basis.
Well, one day Edmond was wandering around his master's estate when he happened across a vanilla flower and he discovered somehow that if he fiddled with it in a certain way, he could pollinate it and it worked.
It produced a bean.
He managed to work out how to pollinate it.
And this is how he did it.
So are you going to pollinate this now? HE SPEAKS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE Jose Luis uses a sliver of wood, just as Edmond Albius did, to move a membrane aside before pollinating the plant.
Jose Luis brushes the pollen on the tip of the stick across the stigma to fertilize the flower.
So what Jose has just done is basically the work of the bee, and brought the male and female parts of the plant together, so it's now fertilised.
I can't believe how lucky we have been.
What a day! You're amazing.
HE SPEAKS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE Discovering how to hand pollinate vanilla was a major breakthrough, but it was the beginning of the end for Mexico's monopoly on the world's supply of the spice.
In less than a hundred years, the island of Madagascar was producing more vanilla than Mexico.
Now little more than 1% of the world's vanilla comes from Mexico.
Hi.
Thank you so much 'Norma Gaya runs one of the oldest vanilla companies in the country.
'Here, after months of curing, the vanilla is graded according to quality.
' We store it here in these boxes Since my great-grandfather, we use the same system.
Wow.
'The best vanilla pods are valued for their rich flavour, aroma and amount of vanillin oil.
' This is naturally.
You can see the crystals.
Oh, yeah, I can see! Very good thing.
The smell! These crystals have a lot of vanillin content.
So it's the vanillin, the content, that makes it valuable, isn't it? I mean, the smell of it is like It doesn't smell like any vanilla I've ever smelt before.
No.
It smells like It smells like alcohol.
I'm feeling a little bit drunk, just smelling it! But what I don't understand, Norma, is why are you producing only a fraction of the world's vanilla? Because people, they don't know that the vanilla is from Mexico, and the vanilla grows here in the Totonac area.
So most of the natural vanilla goes outside of Mexico.
Does that mean that, basically, people like the Totonac farmers - the traditional vanilla growers - have stopped growing? Yes.
So it seems that not only have Mexicans lost interest in vanilla, but the world's traders themselves have turned to other countries with lower labour costs to acquire the spice.
Madagascar and Indonesia have become the places for vanilla.
Mexico has been left behind.
'Jose Manuel Rodriguez is a vanilla exporter 'only too aware of the seriousness of the situation.
' Is there a danger that Mexican vanilla could become extinct? Unfortunately, I would have to say yes.
If things don't change, if producers, farmers, keep getting so disappointed about what they get for their vanilla, and the global market stays so low, they will just stop producing it.
But there is still hope.
Jose is one of a new wave of Mexicans hoping to convince a growing gourmet market that all the work involved in producing the original Mexican vanilla really does make it a product worth rediscovering.
Like saffron, it's amongst the most labour-intensive crops in the world, taking about 18 months of care from the point of pollination to the dried and cured finished spice.
When you smell and touch the vanilla, if you have been in touch with other vanillas, most of the time, you recognise directly the quality.
Then again, it is a matter of what's behind our vanilla.
It's not just the production of a spice, it is the origin of it.
All that which comes behind, all that knowledge from thousands of years, I would try to appeal to you that this is not just vanilla, this is Mexican vanilla.
This is the vanilla the world fell in love with.
'And that seems to be the point.
'The craft of vanilla production is so important to the Totonac way of life, 'its loss would mean the demise of an essential part of their heritage.
' It smells lovely.
So how do the new vanilla enthusiasts get the word out? To find out, I'm on my way to one of the largest cities in the world.
So I've left very early this morning, with the indefatigable Don Jose at the wheel.
Todo bien? Todo bien.
Good, everything is good.
And that's great, because we've got a very long journey ahead of us.
Six to eight hours to get to Mexico City, and it's a long way from here.
22 million people live, work and eat in and around Mexico City.
And in one of its top restaurants, someone is trying to excite the taste buds of some of its more discerning citizens, with a little help from vanilla, of course! Gerardo Vasquez, the chef of this restaurant, is renowned for reintroducing Mexicans to the ingredients that Mexico gave to the world.
I'm starving already just standing here! I just want to try everything.
But what I need to ask you about is vanilla.
We have lost our touch with the traditional ingredients.
Vanilla always has been expensive.
So it was more valuable to people in Mexico to sell it rather than, really, to eat it? Yes, of course.
It became so popular in Europe, in the States, all over the world, and it became so precious.
It's a terrible thing to admit - here I am trying to discover everything about vanilla, and I have to confess to you (I hate it!) If you go out there, I will send you something.
OK.
And I hope you like it.
The taste that most of us associate with vanilla may be little more than a sweet spice.
But vanilla has a very complicated flavour, and Gerardo uses it in both sweet and savoury dishes.
Aha.
Oh! Ooh.
That smells amazing.
This is veal.
Veal? Mmm-hmm.
Now that You can't tell me vanilla's in there? Yes.
Of course.
It has a lot.
A lot? A lot.
All the tiny black points.
Yeah.
It's vanilla? It's vanilla.
But it's so delicious.
Geraldo may be making strides in cosmopolitan Mexico City, but it'll take more than a few a la carte recipes to create a whole new demand for real Totonac vanilla.
Hola! KATE SPEAKS IN SPANISH Buenos dias.
Marthe, hola! Buenos dias.
Put me to work! Put me to work.
'Here in another very different kind of kitchen is a group of Totonac women 'who are part of movement keeping the traditional uses of ingredients like vanilla alive.
'They call themselves "women in smoke" 'and their leader Marthe is determined to make sure 'these cooking skills and recipes get passed on to a new generation.
' OK, so now they're vanilla.
So you toast the vanilla as well? Si.
MARTHE SPEAKS IN SPANISH 'These toasted cocoa beans and vanilla pods are the key ingredients 'for probably the most historically significant drink in Mexico.
' Oh! Like the Aztecs gave to Cortes.
Si.
'It's the drink that Cortes first drank with Montezuma, 'the drink that sealed the fate of Mexico 500 years ago.
'It was a sweet taste for Cortes, but a bitter moment for Mexico.
'Within three years, Montezuma was dead 'and Spain had effectively conquered the country.
' There's the vanilla going in.
What? Oh, you need to wiggle? Si, si! ALL LAUGH AND SHOU You're a slave driver! ALL CHANT AND CHEER I love Totonac cooking! LAUGHTER You're not supposed to laugh at me, I'm trying! SHE SPEAKS IN HER OWN LANGUAGE Nu-uh.
LAUGHTER Oh.
Ooh! So the hot chocolate is ready.
It smells incredible.
It doesn't smell like the hot chocolate you and I know.
It smells like basically a whole bar has been melted into this cup.
And it just turns into a little cup of heaven.
Thank you.
Totonac hospitality.
Here's to it.
'I'm finishing my journey 'with the people who know this spice better than anyone - 'the people who were the original cultivators of a bean 'that was to become known throughout the world.
'It's a unique product with a culture and history 'as rich and unusual as its taste.
'There are many here in Mexico' who would love to see the production of vanilla return to its years of former glory.
There's Gerado the chef, the new generation of traders and producers, but most importantly, it's the Totonac people - the original vanilla people - their farmers and people like Marthe who believe that keeping the Totonac culture alive could ensure a future for Mexican vanilla.
And who knows? Maybe one day we'll be able to walk around our own supermarkets, pick out a vanilla bean that says on its label proudly, "Produce of Mexico.
"