Handbook of Vanilla Science and Technology

INTERVIEW WITH ADELINA CALIZ

In the village of Mafredi (population 160), Adelina Caliz, a Kek’chi woman in her mid-50s, farms a piece of land near her house that she has worked her entire adult life. What is grown on this property is for the consumption of Ms Caliz’s family, which includes her husband Burton and her grown daughter Carla, who works the family farm and lives at the site with her husband and young son. Adelina sells at the market in Punta Gorda 3 or 4 days a week and the market farm is a couple of miles away from the Caliz home. The family also raises turkeys, chickens, and pigs and keeps parrots and rabbits as pets.

Burton and Adelina are dogmatically, emphatically organic. They like to grow vegetables that nobody else has and specialize in hard-to-grow or rare vegetables, such as lettuces or unusual gourds, and uncommon tree fruits. The Caliz family makes most of its money from farming and they count, especially, on their income from allspice production. They are possibly the largest producers of allspice in the Toledo District.

When we arrive at her home, Ms Caliz is in the midst of making dukunu and there is a 5-gallon bucket of stripped corn cobs sitting next to her. She’s cut her finger and is happy to take a break from her work to talk with us. We come to the subject of vanilla via coffee, which her parents used to grow. “We used to have a lot of coffee. People from villages all around would buy it. If they didn’t have money, they’d bring two baby chickens or a five or six pound pig.”

According to Adelina, vanilla was frequently used to flavor coffee, going right into the hot water used to make the beverage. Her mother would collect whole, young plants from the wild when she found them and replant them in a shady part of the yard, wrapping them around sticks or coffee trees.

“We call them the wild ones. They grew by the creek side, around the cohune [palm]. When the pods were ripe, you could smell it.” The beans, collected only from the variety of vanilla with dark green, sword-shaped leaves, were gathered when they were scented and “mauve colored,” but before they split. They were then sun dried, to eliminate all moisture, and stored in bottles for later use in everything from coffee to cacao to sweets, such as bread pudding and stewed pumpkin. For inclusion in the cacao beverage, the vanilla beans were toasted on a comal (a type of griddle used extensively by the Maya), along with cacao beans, to get them crisp enough that they shattered when they were subsequently ground.