Color: A Natural History of the Palette (33 page)

Apart from in recipes, the chief use of saffron in the medieval period was in manuscripts, as a cheap alternative to gold leaf. A poor medieval artist
¹⁷
wanting to imitate gold on his Bible manuscript would have put a few dozen threads into a little dish, covered it with beaten egg-white or “glair,” and allowed it to infuse. I tried it once: overnight it had congealed and become the color of blood oranges. On paper the paint was luminous: not so much like gold but rather as if, with the help of the saffron, the separated egg-white had successfully reclaimed its yolk. Saffron was rarely used on its own—it was not thought to last very long and indeed six months later my own home experiments have already lost some of their luminescence—but from the Middle Ages artists have often mixed it with other pigments to make bright shades of green. It has never been very popular as a dye—although U.S. saffron consultant Ellen Szita reports that in Sardinia the women used it to color their aprons until the middle of the twentieth century—and its main use today is in cooking: as a color, and an intoxicating scent.

Perhaps saffron lost a little of its exotic cachet once it started being grown in Britain, but it was still lucrative, and by the sixteenth century Chipping Walden changed its name officially to Saffron Walden. Perhaps this decision was a celebration of the fact that Walden was now one of the richest towns in the county, thanks to the yellow spice. Or perhaps it was a clever move by the town’s councillors to stake Walden’s claim as the Capital of Saffron once they saw how many of the surrounding villages had started copycat cropping. They also changed the coat of arms to the official and deliberately joky design of three crocuses surrounded by four walls and a portcullis—Saffron Walled-In.
¹⁸

But the town’s fortunes waxed and waned, as those of saffron towns tend to do. In 1540 demand plummeted as European wars meant that the imported spice was cheaper. Then in 1571 there was a crisis when farmers found they had overcropped and their crocuses were limp shadows of what they should have been. Observing them, the Reverend William Harrison wished “to God” that his countrymen “had been heretofore more careful of this commodity. Then would it no doubt have proved more beneficial to our island than cloth or wool.”
¹⁹
In 1681 demand sank to new depths and a Thomas Baskerville noticed in despair how “saffron heads are now grown so cheap that you may now in these parts buy a bushel of them for 1 shilling and 6 pence.”

There were good years too: 1556 saw a wonderful harvest when some of the “crokers” or saffron farmers were heard crowing that “God did shite saffron,” and 1665 was a particularly good year for the burgers of Walden, with the price soaring to more than four pounds a pound (from just over two pounds a pound a few years before) when the story went round that saffron was an excellent remedy for the plague.

But sadly for saffron the wanings were ultimately more frequent than the waxings, until in 1720, when King George I made a formal visit to the nearby great house of Audley End, there was no home-grown saffron from the town to give him. I can imagine the private consternation as the family had to quietly send out for supplies to Bishop’s Stortford a few kilometers away.
²⁰
They would have tried to keep it secret, but how could they when everyone knew that Walden had grown no crocuses for years? The residents of the now falsely named saffron town were never allowed to forget the humiliation. But by 1790 there was no saffron being grown in Bishop’s Stortford or anywhere else.
Crocus sativus
had almost completely disappeared from England.

IN WHICH I FIND JESUS

Hoping that
Crocus sativus
had not almost completely disappeared from Spain, I ordered another coffee. The
barristo
had consulted with some local men, who were hidden in the early morning smoke farther down the bar. “Try Menbrillo down the road,” they advised, and one of them drew a little diagram of what looked like a lollipop in my notebook. I followed his directions (looking out carefully for saffron fields on the way), and when I had mastered the local circular system, Menbrillo turned out to be a village about four kilometers away. Twice I stopped and asked in my best Spanish for the “
campos de azafrán
” and was answered only by shaking heads and friendly shrugs. But then one old couple, both dressed in the dark clothes of rural Spain, started pointing and giving rapid directions. I must have looked blank because suddenly the man was sitting in the front seat, directing me into reverse. His name was Jesús Bellón, he told me, and I smiled to think that it would be Jesus who would lead me to saffron. We drove on bumpy unmade tracks into the countryside, and he told me—in a lovely mixture of languages, including German and French as well as rural Spanish—that he had spent his life as a professional harvester. In the old days he had gone anywhere there was work— Italy, Germany, the South of France—picking olives, melons and, later in the season, grapes for wine. “And sunbathing,” he joked, doing a delightful mime of himself as a holidaymaker in a bikini. “In Saint Tropez.”

We were still laughing when he indicated we had arrived. And there, glowing in the early sunshine, was my first field of
Crocus sativus
. The field was small and enclosed by fencing—reinforcing the sense that this was a valuable crop—and to my joy it was packed with the purple flowers I was looking for. We opened the gate and went in. I bent down and picked the crocus nearest to me, with Jesús pointing out the thin crimson stigmas that were the pure saffron.

The petals were an intoxicating color, fluttering on the edge of blue and purple. In the morning dew they glistened and shone, but what struck me most was their fragility. None of the books had mentioned this, and I had imagined something more robust. After a few seconds in my hand the bits I had touched were bruised—after being pressed in my Spanish pocket dictionary for more than a year the whole flower is now almost diaphanous. “It’s like the wedding gown of a prostitute,” a Spaniard once said, and I don’t disagree. There is something not quite innocent about this bright flower that flaunts its genitals—three red female stigmas and three yellow male stamens, exploding from the center—with such showy pride. But it wears its vulnerability on its sleeve as well: the stigmas have their own sad secret, although I wasn’t to learn that until later. But also, saffron is so delicate. If it doesn’t get the right tender loving care from both humans and the elements then it fades like those sixteenth-century flowers in Saffron Walden when the farmers stopped looking after them. I put one stigma in my mouth. It tasted bitter and was wetly crunchy like a single stem of fresh cress. From that point on, not only was I smitten by this extraordinary spice but also my tongue (I didn’t realize until later) was totally yellow.

The field belonged to Vicente Morago Carrero and his wife, Teleforo. Their forebears on both sides had been growing crocuses for generations, and they had insisted on continuing the practice even though it had gradually become less lucrative. For harvest week they had enlisted their engineer sons José and Manuel, who were twenty-five and thirty, to help out at home. When we arrived, Vicente and the boys were bent double, nimbly filling straw baskets with flowers. They looked as if they had been doing this all their lives, and they probably had—it’s normal to start helping out the family at around the age of eight. The straw baskets were pretty, but they were also necessary: saffron is a fussy flower. It doesn’t like nylon or plastic.

The field was 80 meters long and 30 wide. Which is not impressive in terms of purple cloaks on the Spanish landscape, even though it is pretty when you are in it and very hard work when you are picking it. Jesús commented, making the sons and me blush, that they were both looking for a nice wife. I soon showed myself to be an unsuitable girl, however—just ten minutes of crocus plucking and my back was protesting.
²¹
Teleforo joined us, and I asked her whether she was going to the Saffron Festival at Consuegra, 40 kilometers away. “No time,” she said, “we have so much to do here.” The paradox of saffron farming is that everything has to be done in a hurry (if you don’t pick the flowers by noon you have missed their potency, and they bloom only once), and yet it is such a painstaking process that nothing can be rushed.

I gave Jesús a lift back to the village. He gallantly kissed me on both cheeks, as if this were a reward for his assistance. Then he wished me luck on my return journey. “Be careful. In Madrid they’ll slit your throat for a few pesetas,” he warned, with a shiver-inducing mime of banditry. “I’m worried about those boys,” he continued in the same breath. Bandits? I asked, incredulously. “No, they are so old and not married yet,” he said. “Actually the whole
pueblo
is worried.”

That night I stayed in Consuegra. When I had asked at the Spanish consulate in Hong Kong about Consuegra the reply was “Where?,” and when I got there I understood why. The town has only two claims to fame: a picturesque regiment of white windmills on the hills behind and the Rosa del Azafrán Festival every October. Consuegra is not a wealthy place, nor is it a pretentious one. In fact, as I looked around the door of a promising-looking bar in the main plaza and instead found Formica and video violence, I longed for just a little pretension. Half of the town is flat and full of garages and cheap furniture shops. The other half winds medievally up the hill toward the thirteen windmills, each of which has been given a name from Miguel Cervantes’s seventeenth-century novel
Don Quixote
. In the book, the Don is a man who lives in the Renaissance but desperately wants to be a romantic medieval knight. Everyone, especially Cervantes, laughs at him for his desire to maintain the old ways of chivalry when times have so patently changed. The famous windmills incident, in which the Don attacks the mills thinking (or hoping) they are giants, is about holding onto old ideas, even when the evidence says you are wrong. And there are many people in Consuegra who fear that although saffron is a wonderfully historical thing which looks pretty on the landscape and nice on rice, keeping the harvest going in these days of modernization is simply a kind of tilting at windmills. “Saffron is dead,” said one man bitterly, while I was standing at my hotel bar. “I don’t know why we have this festival.”

By historical rights, the first Saffron Festival should have taken place more than a millennium ago, or perhaps even two. There are two theories about saffron’s presence in La Mancha. One is that it was introduced by the Arabs in the eighth century. But then there is another story, which I like better, which suggests saffron has been in Consuegra since the time of the Romans. In the town’s tiny museum there is a terracotta incense burner from Roman times. It is etched with full-moon fertility symbols, and apparently women used to burn saffron in it and then breathe it in to make them conceive boys. Saffron mythology is as fragile as the plant itself: there are other stories to the effect that drinking a big dose of saffron would lead to an abortion and that an even larger dose could kill.

The Saffron Festival is easier to date than the saffron. It was an invention by a tourist delegation from nearby Toledo in 1962, when they decided their hinterland needed more visitors. Nowadays several thousand people arrive in town for the last weekend in October to watch the competitions and processions and to fill the restaurants with smoke and laughter. This new festival gives families the excuse to get together once a year in the same way that the saffron harvest used to do in the old days. It also probably ensures that some families at least keep a field of crocuses going.

The next morning I met José Angel Ramón, an engineer in his early thirties. He was the first in his family not to grow crocuses. When he was a child his home would be full of visitors helping his mother pick out the red stigmas, and drying them on wood fires until the room was full of an earthy scent. “I remember lots of young women talking, and all the music. There would be parties until midnight.” But that stopped about ten years ago. “It didn’t make sense anymore.” What had happened? “Economics,” he said. Consuegra is a poor town, but it isn’t poor enough. He introduced me to a group of international saffron exporters and we were driven two kilometers outside town to a field owned by the Lozano family, Consuegra’s biggest producers, with seven fields. Apart from the ugly financial sums, what is the biggest problem for saffron growers today? I asked Señor Lozano. “Mice,” he said. They adore the sweet corms. And the cats can’t catch them because the mice of Consuegra are faster than the felines. Which seemed comic until I learned that they have a far from funny death: farmers kill the mice by smoking them out with red chillies, the “natural way.” It sounded like an unnatural way to go.

“The thing is,” said one buyer from Switzerland, “La Mancha might be one of the centers of European production but Europe isn’t where saffron is at right now.” And where is it at? “It’s all happening in Iran,” he said, and then paused for effect. “In Iran the fields are as big as Holland.” The rest of us were silent as we absorbed the concept. I looked over at the range of low-lying mountains to the west of Consuegra, shimmering mauve in the distance, and imagined the whole area, from my feet to those peaks, covered in a Persian carpet of flowers. It was a turning point. I had to get to Iran, I thought.