Color: A Natural History of the Palette (34 page)

But for the moment I was in Consuegra, tilting at windmills, and down in the plaza an hour later the competitors were getting ready for the regional finals of the saffron stripping competition. How many pigments can a petal-plucker pluck if a petal plucker plucks in a competition? I went all the way from Hong Kong to central Spain to find out . . . and I still don’t know. There were thirteen women and one man, all sitting along one side of a white table. In front of each of them was a bag with a hundred flower heads, and a plastic plate on which stones were laid out. I thought there was something significant about the arrangement, but someone pointed out gently that the wind was gusty and nobody wanted to chase the plates around the plaza. A little quiet was called for, and then at a signal they all started to pluck. They had to pick out only the red stigmas. Any stamens in the final bunch scored negative points.

I should have liked to have reported the tension, the cheering, the different villages rooting for their own neighbors in raucous Spanish style, the excited megaphone commentary about how the man from Tembleque was pulling himself up from last position (which, to be fair, he was never in). Or about how the Consuegra champion had been training for months by plucking burrs out of cotton wool or pine needles out of honey. But I can’t. This is not an event with great potential for TV rights. Everything happened in near-total silence except for the racking cough of a grandmother to my right and the screams of a bored infant to my left. It was all very calm and, for a competition, almost disturbingly laid-back. The fingers were not exactly flying, more like scurrying or fumbling. But what the exercise made clear was why saffron is so expensive. Every thread you use has required somebody’s concentrated attention. Each has been touched by a person, not by a machine. There have been attempts to mechanize this bit of the saffron process but it doesn’t work: crocuses are too fragile and the tug at the center of each flower is just a little too hard to calibrate.

On one side of the table were the unwanted flowers: beautiful but rubbish. People have tried to find uses for them through the centuries, but crocus petals don’t seem to contain enough of anything useful, and they are simply thrown away. In Saffron Walden they were at one time a real liability. In 1575 a royal decree prohibited crokers—saffron farmers—from “throwing of saffron flowers and other rubbish into the river in time of flood.” The punishment was two days and nights in the stocks.

The fingers of the Consuegra competitors picked until there was nothing more to pick. The winner was Gabina García from Los Yebenes, closely followed by María Carmen Romero from Madridejos. They looked pleased, but not triumphant. It wasn’t that kind of competition. I have a silly watch—it has a blue digital dial and can only be read if you press a big button. Children love it. But at critical unforeseeable moments, like open-air saffron plucking competitions, it is a liability, as its numbers do not show up in bright sunlight. So I approached the organizers, asking for official times. But the man just shrugged. He said, simply, “The first is first,” and explained how nobody bothered with stopwatches. So for the record, the Spanish October 2000 best time is one hundred sets of stigmas in about eight minutes. Or maybe ten minutes. Approximately.

PERSIAN YELLOW

In the twelve months following my visit to Consuegra I travelled the world looking for color stories, and by October I should have finished my research. But I could not stop thinking about fields of purple stretching to a Persian horizon, and ignoring my looming deadline I applied for an Iranian visa again. However, it was the same week as the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and Tehran turned down an entire batch of applications from Britain. Mine was in it. I tried again two weeks later, and got my visa. Then the Americans and British started bombing Afghanistan, and the northwest of Iran was suddenly off the list of recommended holiday destinations.

I began to hear wildly conflicting rumors. Some people said that Iran’s saffron center of Mashhad was safe; others that it was closed to foreigners because it was so close to the Afghan border. The British Foreign Office had issued a travel warning and even the United Nations had stopped its staff going into some parts of the province. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I contacted a saffron exporter in Mashhad. There’s a problem, he replied immediately. Briefly I imagined refugee tents covering the fields of flowers, or armed Iranian militia keeping out saffron searchers, especially those with cameras and questions. Can’t you come a week later? he continued. The harvest is late this year. I could not delay, and sent a reply saying I hoped there might be at least a couple of crocuses poking their noses out of the sandy soil. “The fields are full of flowers,” he confirmed quickly. “But in a fortnight they will be even more wonderful.”

Three days later I had not only arrived in Iran, but was on an overnight train travelling the thousand kilometers from Tehran to Mashhad. The set dinner was a promise of saffron things to come: boneless chicken kebabs nesting in a bowl of deeply yellow buttery rice. Of course it was saffron, one of my travel companions confirmed. “When an Iranian goes on a journey it is traditional to give them saffron rice. It’s like saying: ‘We give you our best; go with our blessing.’ ”

Before we went to sleep I walked the length of the train, looking for signs that my fellow travellers were on pilgrimage. Mashhad is the holiest city in Iran. It is where Emam Reza, whom the Shiite Muslims believe to have been the eighth leader of the Islamic faith, was murdered with poisoned pomegranate juice. Just as Muslims can call themselves “haji” after visiting Mecca, so they can call themselves “mashti” after praying at the Holy Shrine in Mashhad. I didn’t necessarily find pilgrims, though certainly most women were wearing the full chador, next to which my own little black scarf and coat combination looked positively decadent. But what I did find was Persian classical music in the dining carriage. “Are you Mussulman?” whispered the man next to me. “On
ziyarah
?” I knew that meant pilgrimage, so grinned and whispered that I wasn’t. “And you? On
ziyarah
?” I asked him politely in return. But my Persian accent must have been bad, because he promptly offered me a cigarette. Other people in the carriage tut-ted and told us crossly that we couldn’t smoke in there. My protests that I had meant to say “pilgrimage” were in vain.

THE LAUGHING SPICE

Before I ever saw a saffron field in Iran, or got close to finding the answer to my questions—about whether they were purple mantles and whether they were as big as Holland—I was given two contrasting images to play with. The first was from a film director, and was—in the metaphor of Don Quixote—the medieval image. The second was from a businessman, and it was the full, modern story. I am still not sure which was more intriguing.

In 1992 Ebrahim Mukhtari made a documentary called
Saffron
, about a month in the life of the villagers of Bajestan, 500 kilometers south of Mashhad. What had touched him most about saffron, he said—when I met him in Tehran—was the fragility of the process: the delicacy of placing the corms into that rugged land, the way they open for one day only, and the brittleness of the little dried threads. Ebrahim had not realized it then, but when he filmed in Bajestan he was capturing one of the last old-style harvests. “That is the village I was in,” he said suddenly, pointing to a framed picture on the wall behind me. I had thought, without looking carefully, that it was a Victorian orientalist painting in the style of someone like Lawrence Alma-Tadema: a romantic scene of women weaving in a courtyard, framed by the laden branches of a pomegranate tree. It was actually a framed photograph. That idyllic scene was a real one, and the villagers in the picture were still alive and probably weaving.

My second foretaste of Iranian saffron came from a man who could be called the Sultan of Saffron. Ali Shariati is the general manager of Novin Saffron, the biggest saffron company in the world. It sells 25 tons a year, more than five times the total production of Spain. To get to his office we walked past a truck full of white sacks. A man stood on top of the pile, throwing down the bales to his companions, who would pass them through a doorway. There was a wonderful bounce to the process: those sacks were light. The truck carried about 50 kilos: the dried stigmas of eight million crocuses, each of which had been picked by hand that morning. And this was a small haul: we were still early in the harvest.

It was about seven times that amount which caused a short war in Switzerland six centuries ago. The nobles were trying to assert ancient claims to take land and power from the commoners, and one day in 1374 the businesspeople of Basle decided they were having none of it. They sent saboteurs to the hunts, and put a guerrilla force in the woods to attack the nobles. The aristocrats retaliated by hijacking the merchants’ most valuable trade item: 800 pounds of saffron, freshly arrived from Greece.
²²
The Saffron War lasted for more than three months, with the spice held hostage in a castle; I like to imagine the mythical Chipping Walden pilgrim walking past the rumpus one day on his way home and casually doffing his hat.

As I waited, the assistant manager, Ana Alimardani, played “Mellow Yellow” on her computer, with the singer Donovan crooning that he was “just mad about saffron.” It was hard to stop humming it. What had I expected? I had read the legends of Darius’s men wearing saffron uniforms to fight Alexander the Great, and I had also known about how once a year Zoroastrian priests in Persia used to write special prayers with saffron ink on papyrus, and then nail them onto houses and near farms to ward off pests, and bad spirits.
²³
So after finding both the picturesque and the rural in Spain I had expected the same in Iran, but more so. But that is the extraordinary thing: in Spain the saffron harvest has died out because it is traditional. In Iran it has revived because it is modern. In the past ten years Iran’s production has soared from 30 tons a year to 170. Spain’s has gone from 40 to 5.

We were served saffron tea. It was like drinking liquid rubies: sweet, pure and a very deep red, and yet at the top it had a thin oily layer of gold. “Be careful,” I was told jokingly as the drinks arrived, “or you will laugh too much.” There is a wonderful warning by Culpepper, in his 1649
Complete Herbal
, to the effect that someone consuming too much saffron might die of immoderate laughter, and indeed this herb is something of a natural Prozac. In 1728 the Twickenham gardener Batty Langley published the
New Principles of Gardening
, in which—as well as strict instructions as to the correct way to plant the corms three inches deep and three inches apart—he lists the benefits. “Too much Saffron being taken prevents Sleep, but when taken with Moderation, tis good for the Head, revives the Spirits, expels Drowsiness and makes the Heart merry,” he claimed. Seventeen centuries before, Pliny had even suggested hair of the crocus as a remedy for when the heart has been too merry. Mix it in wine, he said, and it is a wonderful hangover cure. I put my little finger into the dregs of my glass and drew wiggly lines on my notebook. A few months later they are still deep sun yellow, although if I had left them in the light they would certainly have faded.

When Ali Shariati arrived, I felt the need for a calculator, there was such a multitude of zeros in his statistics. But here are some of the best big numbers: 170,000 flowers make one kilo of saffron, which means that Iran’s annual production involves (and we both started scribbling quickly on pieces of paper) twenty-eight billion flowers. How can one imagine twenty-eight billion flowers except in the context that if they were laid petal to petal they would wrap the earth twenty times, or that linked in a chain they would reach to the moon and back with even a little bit to spare at the end? Or that in Iran at harvest time, half a million people are involved with picking them? The best big numbers for the Shariatis are that each of those kilos can be sold for around U.S.$700. But here is where a great saffron myth lies: by the kilo it is indeed the most expensive spice in the world, and yet it is not expensive to use. Saffron is so potent that in recipes it is measured in pinches, not grams. A gram should last most cooks several months and many paellas.

However, the other great saffron myth is not so easily debunked: I had my own anecdote of being ripped off in Kashmir, and it seems that stories like this are as old as saffron itself. The Reverend William Harrison, back in the sixteenth century, observed that unscrupulous dealers would add butter to the saffron to increase the weight (although, he said, you can test it by holding the stigmas by the fire and assessing how greasy they feel). In Iran the problem is that some merchants add artificial red dye—which effectively means the useless yellow stamens can be lumped in easily with the stigmas. “Yes, it’s a problem,” agreed Ali. “But I want to show you something.” And he took me downstairs to a laboratory, where every new batch was being given a thin-layer chromatography test. A chemist dropped a splotch of saffron dye onto metal paper, and allowed a solvent to run through it. Pure saffron leaves yellow marks like cigarette burns on the paper; additives tend to come up in an adventurous range of pinks and oranges.

I looked through the sample sheet. Now that suppliers know they will probably be caught, fewer than one in a hundred samples turn out to be adulterated. But batch A7 6125 had come in a couple of days before, and had tested bright pink. There was a tick beside it, which meant the supplier would be in trouble. I had asked the chemist earlier what the hardest part of her job was and she had laughingly said it was “quite easy, in fact.” But now she reminded me of that question. “This is the hardest part,” she said. “The chance of getting it wrong.” If she makes a mistake and wrongly identifies a batch as adulterated, then she could harm someone’s livelihood. The damage is, of course, limited—the worst thing is that the merchants will lose their biggest client. In saffron’s rather murky past the punishments for faking have been more severe: for example, a man called Jobst Finderlers was once burned in Nuremberg on a bonfire of his own fake saffron.