Nearly thirty years ago, Molly found herself traveling in the magnificent country of Mexico. All her life, she had heard about the wonderful vanilla available in Mexico. After asking several locals where to find the best Mexican vanilla, she purchased a few bottles and returned home to Los Angeles. Being a good friend, she immediately shipped a bottle to her best friend Sherry, who was living in St. Louis.

Vanilla is the only edible fruit of the orchid. It grows naturally for the southern coasts of Mexico, through Central America and the Caribbean to the Northeastern tip of South America. The Totonacs of Veracruz, Mexico are credited as its first cultivators.

The Totonacs considered vanilla a sacred herb and used it in ritual offerings, as a perfume and for medicine, but rarely as a flavoring. By the early 1400s, the Aztecs added to the mystique of vanilla by combining it with chocolate to create the drink chocolatl, which Montezuma served to Cortez upon his arrival in the Aztec capital, Tenochititlan. Cortez took the fragrant bean along with Cacao pods back to Spain.

It takes 18 months for a vanilla cutting to produce its first flowers. The small yellow-green orchid blooms for only a few hours before wilting unless it is naturally pollinated by insects - a rare occurrence - or hand- pollinated by workers. The pollinated orchid will produce a long green been in a few weeks, but the bean must remain on the vine for nine months to develop its complex flavor and fragrance profile. Yet when the beans are harvested, they have neither flavor nor fragrance until they go through an arduous curing and drying process.

Methods of curing and drying vary, but in all cases, the enzymatic process in the live beans must be stopped to prevent fermenting. This is accomplished through heating in ovens or blanching in hot water. The beans are then placed in the sun each morning for weeks, or sometimes months, before being placed in large wooden boxes and allowed to sweat. the beans will lose nearly 80% of the original moisture content before their more than 250 natural flavor and fragrance components are completely developed. The entire process from pollination to shipment takes about one year.