Vanilla and chocolate have a lot in common. Both are native to Mexico. In fact, when Europeans first tasted vanilla, they tasted it along with chocolate!When the Spanish explorers arrived in Mexico, the natives offered them a chocolate drink cooled with snow (from the mountains) and mixed with vanilla as a sweetener, since chocolate, by itself, is bitter.
In Europe, too, chocolate was served along with vanilla for more than a century after arriving from the New World. Then people started using sugar instead of vanilla to sweeten the chocolate; vanilla became a flavor on its own.
All the vanilla consumed in the world was grown in Mexico until 1836, when scientists found a way to grow it in other lands. Today, most of the world's vanilla comes from Madagascar and other islands in the Indian Ocean.
Vanilla comes from an orchid - which is the only orchid on Earth that produces a useful product.
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