Color by Victoria Finlay

Author:Victoria Finlay
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307430830
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T22:00:00+00:00

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.

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