Saffron

Saffron is the dried stigma of Crocus sativus, and its price is a matter of arithmetic rather than mystique.

Each flower produces exactly three stigmas. They must be picked by hand, from flowers that open in a short autumn window and are gathered at dawn before the sun degrades them, and then dried. Something in the region of 150,000 to 200,000 flowers, and correspondingly a very large amount of skilled hand labour, yields one kilogram of dried saffron. There is no mechanised alternative, and there has never been one. That is the entire explanation of the cost.

Crocus sativus is a sterile triploid. It does not set seed and cannot reproduce sexually; every plant is propagated by dividing corms, and the entire world crop is effectively a clone descended from an ancient selection. Its wild ancestor is generally taken to be Crocus cartwrightianus of the Aegean. This means saffron is a human artefact in a strong sense: it exists only because people keep dividing it, and it would vanish without cultivation.

The colour is crocin, a carotenoid of unusual water solubility, which is why saffron dyes an aqueous dish and most carotenoids do not. The bitterness is picrocrocin and the aroma safranal, formed from it during drying.

Because it is expensive, saffron is the most adulterated spice in commerce, historically and now: safflower, turmeric, marigold petals, dyed fibres and coloured threads have all been passed off as it. Medieval Nuremberg operated the Safranschou, a formal inspection code with severe penalties, including burning, for adulterators.

Culpeper assigns saffron to the Sun, on the colour and on the cordial action attributed to it. The reasoning is colour-based and therefore signature reasoning, but reinforced by something else: saffron's cost made it a status substance, and status attaches to the most dignified planet. A dye reserved for the robes of kings and priests was never going to be filed under Saturn.

Culpeper's entry contains a detail worth quoting for its strangeness. He holds that a moderate dose gladdens the heart and quickens the senses, but that excess is dangerous and provokes immoderate laughter, death by laughing is a claim that appears in several early modern sources on saffron. It is not a pharmacological description of anything saffron does. High doses of saffron are genuinely toxic, with an estimated lethal dose in the region of several grams, but the syndrome is bleeding and organ damage, not hilarity.

The plant's documented history reaches much further back than the herbals. Saffron crocuses and saffron-gatherers appear in the Bronze Age frescoes at Akrotiri on Thera, dating to before the mid-second millennium BC, in scenes that appear to show harvest and possibly a ritual or medical context. That is direct archaeological evidence of saffron culture roughly three and a half thousand years old, which is a far stronger foundation than anything the correspondence literature supplies.

Modern research interest has focused on saffron extracts and depressive symptoms, where several small trials have reported positive results and the evidence base remains limited and preliminary.