Grow Your Own Spice!
Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world, and Iran is responsible for over 90 percent of its production. Iranian saffron is mostly grown in the northeast, where the climate is extremely saffron friendly.
Saffron in Popular Literature
In one early eighteenth-century miniature from Rajas-than, used to illustrate a ragmala (a poem, consisting of twelve verses), we get to see saffron do triple duty, not only as a colorant, but as a fixative to the greenish hues and as part of the poetic mode of the depicted scene:
The Modern Market
It takes about 150,000 flowers to produce a kilogram of saffron. Little wonder, then, that the precious powder has spawned a trade rife with the kind of deceptions and distortions typical of traffic in gems or illicit drugs: cheap substitutes, diluted shipments, false labeling. Today, a battle over the future of the ‘gold of cuisine’ is underway, as its world is transformed by speculation and market upheaval.
The Ancient World and the Silk Road
It was those skilled sailors from the Levant, the Phoenicians, who brought saffron both in processed form and its corms to their homeland...
Saffron, the Sacred Flower of the Ancient Past
was considered the source of wild saffron because of a series of wall frescoes unearthed there in the Akrotiri settlement…
