Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid by Tim Ecott Grove Press, 2004; $22.00

What may be the first American recipe for vanilla ice cream, written in the same hand that penned the Declaration of Independence, is among Thomas Jefferson's papers at the Library of Congress. The vanilla flavoring Jefferson used in his kitchen, made from the seedpods of a rare tropical orchid [see "Age and Beauty," by Kenneth M. Cameron, June 2004], had already been popular in Europe for nearly three centuries. The Aztecs showed the Spaniards how vanilla could sweeten their chocolate and perfume their cigars, and the long, dark vanilla beans became part of the Spanish empire's rich colonial trade as early as the middle of the sixteenth century.

Privateers from European nations were soon looking for the stuff during their raids of Spanish galleons, and their booty was directly responsible for Queen Elizabeth I's passion for vanilla-flavored desserts. By the end of the seventeenth century such influential Englishmen as Samuel Pepys and Christopher Wren were frequenting coffeehouses where cocoa drinks, flavored with vanilla, were popular menu items. Starbucks, Haagen-Dazs, and the myriad of other food and drink purveyors that rely on vanilla today are thus the beneficiaries of a venerable and pleasant addiction.

The vanilla bean has been prized throughout its long history, not only for its flavor, but also for its great scarcity. Even today only about 2,200 metric tons of beans reach the world's agricultural markets each year, and the going price for the good stuff in 2004 was close to $275 a pound. Such precious commodities breed violence, and Tim Ecott, whose book recounts his travels to the principal growing sites of the vanilla orchid, needed the steel nerves of a war correspondent to cover this story.

Buyers for the major companies that trade in vanilla travel to remote jungle locations in Indonesia, Madagascar, Mexico, and Papua New Guinea, chartering private planes under aliases to confuse competitors. They carry suitcases stuffed with millions of dollars in cash and visit wealthy growers whose warehouses are surrounded by razor wire and armed guards. Stories of extortion, fraud, and murder in the vanilla trade are as brutal as those told of diamond dealers or heroin smugglers.

The vanilla orchid, its essence so easy on the tongue, has not made things easy for the grower. Although its vine flourishes in many tropical climates, the plant produces no seedpods unless it is fertilized. In nature, that work is done--but only rarely--by a species of tropical bee native to Mexico and Central America. The bee preserved the Spanish domination of the vanilla trade for many centuries. Early vanilla-lovers from other countries, hoping to break the monopoly, managed to transplant cuttings to other parts of the globe, but it was not until the middle of the 1800s that a slave named Edmond, on the French colony of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, devised a way to manually inseminate the plants.

Edmond's discovery laid the groundwork for the global trade Ecott writes about, but producing vanilla remains a tedious and time consuming process. It takes months for the seedpods to develop, and months more to cure the seeds. Once the vanilla beans reach the processing factory, extracting the concentrated flavoring can take weeks more, because the dried beans must be steeped in alcohol. Ecott's fascinating travelogue makes it clear that the high price of that little vial of natural vanilla extract is, by any measure, a bargain.

Modern chemists have learned to synthesize the principal ingredient of vanilla, and more than 90 percent of vanilla-flavored foods now contain the artificial stuff. But the real beans contain an estimated 400 trace components that greatly enhance the flavor, and natural vanilla will surely reign supreme for a long time among lovers of good food.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K.T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.