Color: A Natural History of the Palette (32 page)

I wondered whether Mr. Li had any wartime pieces. “Somewhere,” he said, and disappeared into one of the back rooms. A few minutes later he emerged with a dirty plastic Park N Shop bag from one of Hong Kong’s big supermarket chains. It was full of dark green-brown crumbly versions of the clean gamboge: as if someone had chewed the toffee and spat it out onto dirt before leaving it to harden again. “This is the stuff we got during the war: very bad, full of impurities.” Many of the bamboo gamboge-holders would have fallen onto the ground, so people would have gone looking for the resin that had dripped onto the soil. “I should like to find some gamboge,” I said, dreamily, imagining myself in a woodland grove deep in the jungle, learning how to make that gash in the trunk with a curved knife, and later being told the ancestral myths of the trees that bleed yellow paint. “No you wouldn’t,” said Mr. Li firmly. We all looked up in surprise. What did he mean? “There are landmines there: people get killed for gamboge,” he said.

This pretty paint can be dangerous in other ways, I learned later. Winsor & Newton have been receiving small parcels of gamboge from their Southeast Asian suppliers since before anyone can remember, and probably since the company started in the mid-nineteenth century. When it arrives at the factory they grind it up carefully and sell it in tubes or pans as one of their more expensive watercolors. But some of the packages that arrived in the 1970s and 1980s from Cambodia and possibly Vietnam were different: the gamboge contained exploded bullets. The company’s technical director, Ian Garrett, has five of them displayed in his office now: a reminder to him and his colleagues of how some of the paint materials they can so easily take for granted come from places where people have lived through unimaginable suffering. One day, during the height of the Vietnam War, or perhaps during the horrors of the murderous Pol Pot regime, a soldier, or a group of soldiers, must have gone into the garcinia grove and sprayed bullets around the area with machine guns. Some of these lodged safely in the bamboo, to be found months or years later by paint-makers in Harrow. What happened to the other bullets can only be imagined.

I liked my piece of gamboge from Man Luen Choon very much. When I added a drop of water to it and created bright yellow paint, I felt like a magician and showed the trick to all the children I met. Once, on a train in England, I sat opposite a nine-year-old boy who liked strange artifacts in the same way that I have always done. He was travelling with his grandmother and had just been to visit a relative who had given him a skin drum from Indonesia. He held it proudly—he knew this was a magical thing. I showed him my gamboge trick and told him the story, explaining about the war, and why people are sometimes prepared to take different risks in wartime. He was interested, so I gave the piece to him. I now wish that I hadn’t.

Four days later I was in America, talking to pigments specialist Michael Skalka at the National Gallery in Washington. I mentioned I had bought gamboge in Hong Kong. He commented that it made a pretty paint. “But it’s poison,” he said. Gamboge probably won’t kill you like orpiment, I learned later to my relief—although it has been a possible murder weapon in at least one Chinese detective story, injected into a peach
¹³
—but it won’t be nice. It is one of the most efficient diuretics that nature knows— put it accidentally in your mouth and you’ll be in the bathroom all day. Another yellow dye—buckthorn—has the same effect. In fact it is quite a characteristic of things that are vibrating at the yellow resonance. Gourds, unripe pineapple, yellow dock root and yellow flag irises all have the same violently purgative effect. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Indian Vedic tradition places yellow at the second chakra—the navel, just above the colon.

I called my friend Yeung Wai-man a few weeks later. Did she know that gamboge was really poisonous? Oh yes, she said cheerfully. “I did know that . . . Actually, it’s the reason why no cockroaches will eat Fong So’s paintings. He leaves them on the floor at night and at first I was worried that insects would eat them because they eat everything else.” She called out to Fong So, who was painting in the other room, to check. He concurred that his art was preserved for posterity partly because the yellow paint scared away the hungry creepy-crawlies. “People would use gamboge as insect repellent, but it’s too expensive,” he said.

SAFFRON

The last two souvenirs on my shelf are jars of the most expensive and most colorful spice in the world: saffron. And, like gamboge, it is full of paradoxes. It is red but it is yellow; it is expensive but it is affordable; it can dry out your liver but it can make you roar with laughter; it has almost died out but it is produced in bulk. Unlike gamboge, however, saffron is frequently faked. As I found out to my cost.

My first encounter with saffron, in name at least, was in Kashmir in the mid-1980s. I visited the northern Indian state three summers in a row while I was a student, in the years before it started its messy fight for independence. I was waiting for the passes to open to the north, and one year the snow stayed longer than I expected, and I spent several days hanging out on a houseboat on Dal Lake in the capital of Srinagar, enjoying the home cooking and watching the shikara gondolier salesmen touting their wares. “You want marijuana?” they would cry, when I’d turned down the colas and sweets. No thanks. “Opium?” they would banter. No, really. “Aha, I know,” they would say, in triumph, pulling out their last card in the poker game of Western decadence. “You want Tampax?”

I only ever bought one thing from a shikara man: a grubby packet of something yellow. “You want saffron?” he had asked, and I was curious and asked to see the goods. The man used far more subterfuge than his colleague, who was busily offloading stubs of hashish to more savvy travellers on the next-door houseboat. Of course he was acting suspiciously, I realized later. The bag was full of safflower—that cheaper red spice I encountered in the orange chapter, which doesn’t have either the charm or the bitter earthiness of the real thing. And I, an ignorant teenager on my first travels, bought it eagerly. Perhaps it didn’t matter that it wasn’t saffron on that occasion: after all, at the time I didn’t really know what to do with it.

I knew that it was the world’s most expensive spice, I knew that it was yellow (although in the packet I had bought it looked orange and in fact, if it had been genuine, it should have been crimson red), and I knew it was from a flower. I also knew that the Indian government had restricted exports of Kashmiri saffron as part of the same protectionist policy that meant I was drinking a drink called Campa Cola instead of any familiar American brands. But I didn’t know then that a double pinch of saffron in hot water with honey can be an instant reviver, nor did I know how to add this spice to long-grained rice to make it taste like the earth and look like the sun; I didn’t know that the flower it came from was the crocus, nor did I know how long it was going to take before I learned all these things.

A few years later I thought I found real saffron again, this time on Tibetan monastic robes. I had read many descriptions where the yellow (and sometimes even the red) robes are described as “saffron,” and I had accepted the image gladly, probably using it myself. But where, I asked once, innocently, do they get the saffron for dyeing the robes? After all, although the spice had been grown in nearby Kashmir since at least 500 B.C. and probably much longer, Tibet was surely too high for anything so delicate to grow. My nun friend laughed. Buddhist robes are worn to show how humble one is, she explained, not to show off that one has had access to the most expensive spice in the world.

In Tibet, robes were usually dyed with turmeric, which was cheap and the color of the simple earth. And in Thailand the monks’ robes are often colored with the heart of the jackfruit, and once a year—in November—is the official Day of Dyeing, when they go down to the river in the early morning with their fruits and their pots, and they color their robes again. Nowadays, of course, many robes are synthetically dyed, but even among the natural ones none is colored with saffron. I was going to have to look elsewhere to find this essentially sensual yellow. And it made sense to go straight to the harvest.

Not to the Kashmir one, I decided, even though the Kashmiri people claim (probably wrongly) that it is the place where saffron was born. After years of civil crisis, the industry there was in shreds, and producing less than a ton a year. But saffron crocuses are grown in many places. The most famous is Spain, home of the paella, but they can also be found in Iran, Macedonia, France and Morocco, with bijou crops in New Zealand, Tasmania and North Wales among other places.
¹⁴
I played with the notion of visiting Macedonia, Alexander the Great’s birthplace, after discovering there was a town called Krokos, named after the saffron flower. Then I thought of Iran—after all, the Persians were famous for their yellow rice—and called up my nearest Iranian embassy, which was in Canberra. “No problem,” they said, telling me to send my passport down for a visa. I’m British, I added as an afterthought. “Very problem,” was the cheerful reply.

So instead I went to La Mancha, the center of Spanish saffron production, at the peak of the harvest, the end of October. Surely there I would find my genuine yellow dye, I thought. But as I drove around on my first morning, eyes on high alert to spot anything brightly colored through the early mist, I realized that not only was I quite incapable of finding a saffron field without help, but that the Spanish saffron industry was in deep trouble. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to look for: I did. I knew the astonishing fact that this perfectly yellow dye spice comes from a perfectly purple flower. With this crucial piece of information I thought even the most botanically inept saffron-seeker could spot a field in full bloom. But I couldn’t.

I had a book with me—John Humphries’s
The Essential Saffron Companion
, which was certainly essential, and full of wonderful recipes, but also, although only eight years old, quite out of date. In 1993 Humphries had spent several days in this rural area south of Madrid during the harvest. He had not only found a “mantle of purple; a sea of saffron,” draped and washed over the Spanish landscape, he had also been introduced to contemporary cave-dwellers living just a few hundred meters from his hotel in the small town of Manzanares, and had vividly described how they ventured out at dawn to gather their harvest, bringing it back to their caves to be dried. Humphries had drawn an irresistibly romantic picture of a tradition that had evidently hardly changed in a thousand years. Manzanares, then, was going to be my first stop: I couldn’t wait to see the caves.

It was about eight o’clock, and it had just got light, when I arrived at the place Humphries had described. But however carefully I examined the surrounding fields and the fields surrounding those, I couldn’t even find a purple petal. Let alone purple mantles or black-clad troglodytes. Disconsolate after my predawn start, I stopped at a café for espresso and advice. “No one grows saffron round Manzanares anymore,” the
barristo
told me kindly. “There’s no money in it.”

I consoled myself with the fact that I wasn’t the first one to go hunting for saffron and not find it, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the eccentric Reverend William Herbert left his flock at Manchester Cathedral where he was dean, and set off around Europe in search of crocuses. He tried to find the birthplace of
Crocus sativus
—which he had tried to grow in his Yorkshire garden, although in thirty years he had seen it bloom only three times. In Greece and Italy he too had looked for purple mantles. But instead he just found a few bulbs. “I suspect that the birthplace of C. sativus has been long converted into vineyards,” he concluded sadly.
¹⁵

There is something magical about the saffron crocus. One evening the sun goes down on a bare field, then as if from nowhere the flower appears overnight, blooms for a morning, and then by the end of the day it has gone. The saffron business can be like its own flowers: here this morning, gone this afternoon, all at the whim of the market and the weather. Neither I nor the good Reverend Herbert should have been surprised that the European crop had shifted fields—the experience of English saffron, unlikely as it sounds today as a concept, should have told us how this industry is subject to tremendous shifts of fortune.

SAFFRON WALDEN

It was a medieval pilgrim, the myth goes, who brought saffron to Essex. He apparently risked his life to get it out of the Holy Land and back to Chipping Walden’s chalky soil, and he rather cleverly carried it in his hat. It is more likely, of course, if this chap existed at all, that he picked up the saffron corms—as the shallot-like bulbs are called—in a field in northern Greece on the long walk home, but a story is always so much more dramatic if there is a death penalty involved. Hats and pilgrims or no hats and pilgrims, it would actually have been extraordinary if saffron corms had not arrived in Britain by the Middle Ages, so great was the interest in spices of all kinds.

It was a curious time for cooks: the more pepper with the entrées, the richer the hosts showed themselves to be. Most people did not have the money even to taste these spices—at that time they were very rare and very expensive (partly because they came mostly from remote islands in Southeast Asia and partly because Venetian merchants held the monopoly so could inflate the prices
¹⁶
), and yet chefs in the big houses were busy inventing recipes with a kind of frenzy for exotica. Cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon from the distant Indies were all thrown in in eye-watering quantities—if advertising campaigns had been invented by then we could imagine the slogans: “Taste the bounty . . . prepare partridges with pinches of paradise.” And “safroun” was, in its various spelling incarnations, one of the most popular ingredients. In 1380 Chaucer wrote about the doughty knight Sir Thopas whose “heer, his berd was lyk saffroun”—his hair and beard were the color of saffron.