Saffron' 38 Club Information

Over the millennia, saffron has remained amongst the most costly of substances, frequently challenging gold for the top spot. Why?

For the past thousands of years, it has been credited as the best flavouring of foods and wines, as the most effective remedy for some ninety-odd ailments, as the best way of ensuring your health, your libido, your status and your body odour, and of course, as the best, richest yellow dye for foods, textiles and your skin. Cleopatra (we are told) bathed in a hot saffron tub before meeting Anthony (to mention just one!), emerging with a golden glow and all her buttons pressed and ready for action! Remember Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 film? Richard Burton stood no chance!

Alexander the Great also bathed in saffron, but to heal his many wounds, and recommended his troops to do the same. Pay scales were obviously different in those days.

At the time of the Black Death (mid-14th C) saffron was in great demand as the only cure, notwithstanding the fact that by then, all the European saffron farmers had been killed off by the plague. Sources of saffron in the Islamic world were not obtainable, so soon after the Crusades.

But hold on, we are getting ahead of ourselves here. What is saffron? Next time you see a crocus, look for the stigma and styles. If they are a bright crimson in colour, be aware you may be looking at a serious source of income, always accepting that you will need quite a lot of them before approaching the world market. You will need about half a million little stigmas, from about 150,000 flowers to make a kilo of saffron –but each kilo will earn you about $5000.

Note the acres of crocuses in Iran (above) where 90% of world production comes from.

In southern Turkey, Crete and Iran the crocus sativus was being cultivated at least 4000 years ago. No, not wild, the crocus is sterile, meaning that the flowers are merely decoration and the corm produces mini-corms that, in time will mature into ‘saffron’ -producing flowers, albeit, only once. Hence the clusters seen in the photograph. But, if it wasn’t ‘wild’, where did it come from?

The Greek legend tells us that a young lad called Crocus was in amorous pursuit of the nymph Smilax, but after what was called ‘an idyllic interlude of love’ she got bored and rejected any further advances. He persisted and she waved her magic wand and turned him into a flower – the saffron crocus! His radiant orange stigmas glowed with an undying and unrequited passion. (This is the expurgated version, by the way. See Ovid’ s Metamorphoses for more. Ed.). The answer is that we don’t know, but Turkey is a strong contender, the climate of warmth and sufficient rain at the right time and growing on hillsides that face the sun being paramount to its survival. It is not hard to imagine that once the strength of the stigmas as a dye was noted, the corms were used for bartering with other regions, and so the crocus spread across the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. It is equally understandable that when some crocuses grew longer stigmas than others, their baby corms were more highly prized.

The market is protected by an international standard (ISO 3632) that determines the quality of natural saffron, and, so far, we have not found a synthetic equivalent that does all that saffron does, so keep taking your medications and enjoy your saffron rice.

Submitted by Geoff Morgan

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