Saturday 18 April 2015

Réunion - How I made Canard à la Vanille

Due to its strategic location in the western Indian ocean and its history as a centre of contact between European, African and Asian cultures, the island of Réunion has quite a variety of culinary traditions. Whether it's Indian-style carris or Madagascan-style stews like rougail, there's quite a lot to choose from.

I plumped for a dish that combines European and African traditions, with a bit of Chinese duck thrown in for good measure!  As I've recently been learning about the history of vanilla and the role Réunion has played in global vanilla cultivation, I really wanted to experiment by cooking with vanilla myself, for the very first time.

I looked at a few different sources online and then made my own recipe, but I was heavily influenced by Celtnet,org's recipe for Clementine and Vanilla Duck.  This is a great website, that I've used many times in the past and it's a labour of love which currently needs some funding to keep the website going, if you're interested in supporting a worthy cause!

The ingredients


Ingredients for Canard à la Vanille
4 duck breast fillets - 4 filets magret de canard (my fillets were marinated in lemon juice and star anise, which gave them a lovely taste)
2 vanilla pods - 2 gousses de vanille
6 oranges - 6 oranges (smaller oranges like clementines or mandarins work best - I used mandarins)
orange juice - jus d'orange
4 tomatoes - 4 tomates
2 onions - 2 oignons
a cup of rice - une tasse du riz
1 lemon - 1 citron
rocket salad - salade de roquette
French dressing - vinaigrette

How I made Canard à la Vanille

I usually start by making my rice, which I added lemon juice and rind to, once it had cooked, to give it nice tangy taste.

Preparing the orange juice

Next, I prepared the main ingredients.  I chopped the duck breasts into bite-sized pieces; separated four of the oranges into segments or carpels; juiced the other two oranges; chopped the onions; chopped the tomatoes; halved the vanilla pods, then sliced them lengthwise to expose the vanilla seeds.

Prepare the ingredients for the Vanilla Duck stew

I started by frying the duck breasts until they had cooked through and browned on the outside - I removed the duck pieces and set them to one side.

Cook the duck pieces until they brown
Next I fried the chopped onion, until it had softened and yellowed a bit - I added a dash of water and some orange juice, to collect some of the duck fat at the bottom of the pan, so I could start making a sauce.  Next I added the orange pieces and vanilla pods, finally adding the chopped tomatoes and letting the whole mixture stew on a low heat for about 20 minutes, occasionally adding orange juice or water.

Vanilla and orange stew
It was interesting handling the vanilla - the pods were quite 'earthy' and smelt amazing, when I'd split them open.  Most people I know have only ever used vanilla to make ice-cream or dessert, so it was a thrill to add it to a stew - it also felt a bit decadent, considering the price of vanilla pods!

Vanilla pods
Once in the ingredients had stewed a bit, I re-added the duck pieces and some more orange juice and let the whole lot stew on a slightly higher heat for another ten minutes.

Vanilla Duck stew

I served with the lemon-rice, rocket salad and French dressing.  The end result was miam-miam!

Canard à la Vanille served with lemon-rice and rocket salad

Image credits:

All images were taken by me on my trusty Canon EOS 1100D.  Feel free to re-use these images with the Creative commons license:

- Attribution (especially to this blog post)
- Non-commercial
- Share alike


Friday 3 April 2015

Réunion - In Search of the Ice-Cream Orchid

When I started researching Réunion, I was interested in finding out what the island is famous for and vanilla came up quite quickly as a potential topic, which surprised me, as I had no idea about Réunion's role in the history of vanilla production.

To prepare for this blog post, I managed to get my hands on a copy of Tim Ecott's Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid (2004), a really informative and enjoyable book, which traces the history of vanilla from its natural habitat of Veracruz/Oaxaca, to the first successful cultivation of vanilla overseas in Réunion and its later cultivation in other parts of the world.

As I've blogged about Oaxaca and the Columbian Exchange, I wasn't that surprised to learn that vanilla comes from the 'New World'.  I'm developing a default assumption that many of the world's most popular plants/food products come from the Americas (cacao, chillies, rubber, turkey, potatoes, to name but a few!).

Vanilla pods by B.navez 
What's interesting about vanilla, at least vanilla planifolia, the highly aromatic species of vanilla that we use in food flavouring and perfumes, is that it really wasn't that widespread, even in the Americas and has only been found in its natural state, in a very concentrated area of southern Mexico. The Aztecs called vanilla tlilxochitl or 'black flower' as, by the time vanilla pods arrived in Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico city), they had dried out and discoloured, therefore the Aztecs had never seen live vanilla plants.

Of course, there are many types of vanilla and most are not aromatic. Due to the scarcity and labour-intensiveness of vanilla farming, it has become a much sought-after delicacy and could cost anything between $20 and $300 a kilo, depending on the global harvest, the second most expensive ingredient after saffron - not bad for a non-essential food!

Similar to my blog post on cloves, it turns out that vanilla is a type of flower and it's the only orchid which is cultivated as a food source, rather than for decorative purposes.  There are many artificial vanilla extracts on the market and the chances are, if you think you've tasted natural vanilla, you probably haven't!

So what drives our obsession with this hard-to-cultivate flower pod?  It seems there are three main answers: chocolate, ice-cream and soft drinks.  Vanilla has long been added to chocolate and this is how Europeans first encountered its taste. In the late 19th century, people in the United States started becoming a bit obsessed with ice-cream production, which pretty much sealed the future success of vanilla!  Also, although they don't release details of their 'secret recipes', I'm pretty sure that companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi use real vanilla extract in the manufacture of their soft drinks.

Because of its dependency on pollination by a particular species of mountain bee that's only found in southern Mexico, vanilla cultivation didn't transfer to other parts of the world as quickly as other American plants, such as cacao and potatoes.  In his book, Ecott tells a really interesting story about Edmond Albius, the slave-boy on Réunion island who discovered the technique for self-pollinating vanilla plants and opened up the rest of the world to vanilla production.

Edmond Albius, circa 1863
Albius' fate was tied up with the racism of that time and, rather than being fêted or honoured for his ingenious discovery, white Europeans couldn't believe that a slave-boy would have the intelligence to make such an important contribution towards the world of science and many refused to recognise that his intervention in the development of vanilla production was anything more than an accident.  He died impoverished on Réunion island in 1880, during the decade when Réunion became the first place to overtake Mexico in terms of vanilla production.

Ecott also travels to some of the other great centres of vanilla production such as French Polynesia (Tahiti) and Madagascar.  As the price of vanilla is so high, there is a lot of secrecy around the industry and Ecott's book gave me an insight into a world of armed vehicles, heavily-guarded crops and clandestine flights between Antananarivo and Paris!

A bad harvest can inflate the price of next year's vanilla, as happened in 2004, when the price reached $500 dollars per kilo.  There has also recently been a hike in worldwide vanilla prices, so the drama around vanilla cultivation seems destined to continue for many years to come.

I found some really useful information on the website of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.  According to their stats, the top producers of vanilla in the past two years have been Indonesia and Madagascar (both producing over 3,000 tonnes of vanilla), followed by Mexico, Papua New Guinea and China (with just around 500 tonnes each).

As you can see from the stats below, the production of vanilla in Réunion has fallen dramatically in the last twenty years, from 93 tonnes of vanilla in 1993, to just 8 tonnes of vanilla in 2013.

Vanilla production in Réunion, according to FAO

Réunion's main crop these days is sugar cane and, by way of comparison, I learned that Réunion produced almost 2 million tonnes of sugar cane in 2013 - nothing near the 460 million tonnes produced by world leader Brazil, but not bad for a small island in the Indian ocean and obviously they now produce a lot more sugar cane than they do vanilla.

In the same period, vanilla production has doubled in Indonesia and trebled in Madagascar. Something to think about next time you tuck into a tub of vanilla ice-cream!

Vanilla production in Indonesia, according to FAO
Vanilla production in Madagascar, according to FAO
Image credits:

The image of the vanilla pods is from Wikipedia and has been shared using the Creative commons license - see more details about this image on the file information page.  

The image of Edmond Albius is in the public domain and the statistic images are from the Food and Agricultural Organisation's stats portal.