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Secrets of Saffron: The Vagabond Life of the World's Most Seductive Spice Crocus, and Smilax may be turn’d to flow’rs,/ I pass a hundred legends stale, as these,/ Ovid, Metamorphoses How the nymph Smilax–eternally radiant, never to wither under the cold blast of age–dealt so capriciously with the tenacious nature of a mortal lover: A handsome youth named Crocus was passing through the Athenian forest on his way to his parents’ house when he spied Smilax dancing in a clearing with her friends. As is the way with nymphs, they called a coy welcome to him and he returned their greeting, though surely he must have hesitated a bit, hampered by an awkward reserve before such abundant beauty. And yet he could not help gazing at them and, in gazing, distinguishing Smilax as the fairest. It does not take much for a nymph to encourage a man; her youth, her suppleness, her gaiety only magnifies the sense of rapture that surrounds her and that was enough for Crocus to relinquish his heart. Did he and Smilax exchange many words? Did they speak of what was in their souls? Of course not: he had lived far too few days and she too many for anything but the moment to matter. And so Crocus began to haunt the forest and, for a time, alone and unattended, Smilax allowed him to find her. To have a mortal worship you is as close a taste of power as a nymph will ever possess. What did she care if he began to neglect his parents, his friends, the chores he had at home just for the sake of being near her? He would not hear from anyone–not his father and heartbroken mother nor his boyhood friends–how much trouble a nymph could bring. Each day, he went into the forest and each night he left more bewitched than ever before. But soon, far too soon, Smilax grew weary of him, his adoration a nuisance to her. It was once a sweet pleasure to let a handsome human run his hands down her body, but now she longed to be away with the other nymphs, to dance and feast and swim with them in the deep cool forest brooks. But Crocus would not be so easily thwarted–even by her. And so he continued to go into the forest to seek her out until, at last, Smilax turned peevish and transformed him into a small purple flower with a fiery heart. There are such few places in the world where saffron naturally grows that its origins in an ill-tempered girl and her bothersome sweetheart must have made a certain sense. Most spices come from the Far East, but this–the most precious spice of all–thrives only where a hot Mediterranean breeze rakes across arid ground. Primeval traces are found in the pigment of pre-historic beasts painted on the cold walls of Iraqi caves and in tattered threads pulled from disintegrating carpets and funeral shrouds of the ancient Persian court. Monkeys and young girls gather it on palace frescos in Crete, legendary accounts survive of sailors risking their lives along the Balkan shores and down the rocky southern coast of Cilcia where the finest saffron was thought to be found. In this small circle of the world–and in no other–does saffron flourish of its own accord. Where ever else the crocus bulb once grew, it arrived in the pockets of conquering armies or the leather pouches of thieves and tradesmen, of those who could not do without its potent taste or saw in its arduous rarity a chance for riches. To succeed, however, the crocus bulb must find in foreign soil a replica of its ancestral homelands and so it has rarely settled far from the Mediterranean shore. The ideal spot for a saffron field stretches south, in a climate of strong summer heat and steady wintry cold, with nothing upon the field to shield the ground from the sun. The soil must be rich, well dressed, carefully tended; the air dry, even a little parched. In the month of June, the plain little knuckle-size brown corms are buried deep, as many as the ground will hold and then, except to occasionally weed and, if necessary, water the field, there is nothing left for the saffron grower to do. The summer deepens and the world goes on about its business. While the neighboring fields are tilled and cultivated and harvested, the saffron corm mask themselves as pretty flowers. Spindly green leaves and the tips of tightly wrapped buds gradually appear, embedding the saffron plains with tiny purple spikes. Through the long hot summer days, the sun’s heat and the earth’s strength are slowly siphoned into the tight confines of the spike’s core. It is not until everything else has gone to seed, after more showy specimens have spent their beauty in summer’s heat and there is scarcely a temperate breath remaining in the October sky, that the saffron crocus unfurls in a burst of sudden purple radiance, the dawning light revealing the splendor dancing amidst the surrounding fallowed landscape. A cry lets out, the bells are rung and workers rush into the fields, shuffling up and down and across the rows of blossoms, to gather as many as they can before the midday sun wilts the crocus’s petals and melts its surfeit heart. And it is the heart–the three plump trumpet-shaped stigmas and a bit of white style–that has for thousands of years been the prize. Such fragile potency makes the harvest fast and brutal. The one or two weeks during which the flowers bloom–three blossoms for each corm, opening on succeeding mornings–require Herculean drive. Fingers gnarl and backs begin to ache. Eyes grow weary, skin stains a burnt orange hue. It is delicate work and has, so far, resisted modern machines and innovations. For that reason, saffron is most at home in rustic pockets of insular countries: With the mainstay crops already gathered for the winter, the tedious work is accomplished by needy farmers who consider saffron as a small, but dependable, investment. The exhausting industry necessary to produce even the faintest amount of saffron is performed more often than not in the pleasant anticipation of the high price and eager buyers the spice commands. Yet, a little is always reserved from the harvest–a private store that the farmers hoard for themselves. And that is the reward for the tired workers. Even beyond its economic worth, there is the anticipation of what saffron generously bestows to even the meanest of circumstances. In the dying embers of the autumn day, while the thin filaments of the crocus’ heart are laid upon a screen to dry, the rising scent imparts venerable dreams of feasts to come; in the ruddy hue staining weary fingertips there is the faint reminder of summer’s sunsets to toast chilling bones. I do not know who first stirred saffron into a cup of water to use as paint or dye, or rouge a pouting mouth or burnish a broth for the evening’s meal, but I do know a little about how saffron warms chilled bones. I felt my own begin to thaw the first time I truly tasted the spice. It was in a northern city by the sea and from the high window of the house where I was staying, I could see ice floes in the harbor bobbing up and down among the steely waves. The three little rooms behind me were frigid, as well. There was a narrow front room with neat rows of paperback books against the wall, a small wooden table by the window with a good typewriter on it and, in a corner, an old, and curiously fancy, wooden wheelchair. Its high back was intricately caned, framed in garlands of carved wooden leaves and roses; on the arm and foot rests it appeared as if drops of blood had been rubbed into the grain. In another room off to the side there was a wide mattress on the floor and it, too, was surrounded by rows of books. Both these rooms were dark, heavily curtained by the branches of overgrown fir trees that constantly brushed against the windows and over the gabled roof top. The brightest room was the one you entered first–a large kitchen with a sink and an old stove and an even older refrigerator. But there was a long wooden table down the center with comfortable chairs surrounding it, and three wide windows facing the barren expanse of the harbor and the sea. I did not belong in these rooms. The books–all fine, American classics–and the mattress, the one skillet and enormous stock pot, and especially the wheelchair, belonged to a couple I knew at the university. With the good will of a rich aunt, they were in Bermuda and I was paying their January rent while I looked for a place of my own. I also took the rooms so I could be with the man I had fallen in love with and, above all that, to have a quiet place to work. But a week after I moved in, the man was given a co-op assignment in another city two hours away and I was so cold and lonely and spooked by the wheelchair and the fir trees always sweeping the windows that, instead of looking for an apartment or doing any work, I fell sick. I spent the days coughing and wheezing in the kitchen, listening to the couple’s albums and the radio when I needed to hear another human voice. I lived on oatmeal and tea and spent hours pondering my misery. And that was how a friend of the couple’s found me when he showed up one afternoon looking for them. I had met Michael the first semester that I transferred to the university. We took a writing class together where he wrote brilliantly funny stories and fought with the teacher whom he admired but did not like. He was tall and thin in an undernourished, intense, way and was always rushing off with other people to readings and bars. I never had the courage to talk to him; I admired his work but he often appeared surly. By the next semester he was gone and he did not return the following fall. But here he was now, looping uninvited into the kitchen and sitting down at the table while I remained at the open door with an old blanket wrapped around my long rosebud-printed flannel nightgown. He asked where his friends were. I told him they were in Bermuda. He took that in and after an awkward pause when he did not get up from the table, I offered him some tea which he accepted. I put the kettle on, got another mug down from the shelf, cut my last orange into equal quarters and scrounged up a plate of crackers. It was a lustrous winter day, the sun splintering off the snow on the surrounding rooftops to refract across the kitchen floor in warming struts. Michael devoured every last orange slice while he told me quickly how he was just back from Alaska where he had been working on a salmon boat and then at a fish processing plant. He stretched out his hands to show me his tapered fingers scarred from hooks and nets and scaling knives. He looked older than I remembered from class. His hair was long, blond yet almost grizzly around his gaunt face. But he seemed stronger, his shoulders and arms muscular, as if he had been whittled down to where only his mettle showed. When the tea was made, I set the mug down before him, then took a chair across the table. “Did I wake you?” He asked after awhile. I shook my head. “I’ve been sick.” “With what?” “I don’t know.” He reached his hand across the table and placed it gently over my forehead. I could feel the callouses on his palms and fingertips press against my skin. “You have a fever,” he said. I told him I was taking aspirin. “There’s something better,” he replied and quickly finished his tea. “Get into bed and I’ll make it for you.” I did not know this man and felt I should be alarmed by him. What did I know of him beyond the few stories of his I had heard? And now here he was, fresh from the wilderness, ordering me to bed. But there was something in his manner–a distance and a caution–that allayed my reserve. I wrapped the tattered blanket around my shoulders and did as I was told. Michael stayed behind in the kitchen and after I laid down on the mattress I heard a pot banging down on the stove. The refrigerator door opened and closed. Cans and boxes were shifted across the open shelves. Then his footsteps trailed toward the apartment door and the lock clicked behind him as he left. I was already half asleep and did not have the energy to call after him. The old window beside the bed funneled the cold wind across the mattress, and I burrowed down deeper under the layers of feather quilts, woolen blankets and knitted afghans. I awoke to darkness, not knowing how long I had slept. The door to the room had been shut and a pungent, spicy scent that cut through my stuffy nose infused the air. I struggled out from under the blankets, turned on a lamp and peered into the long mirror propped up against the wall across from the mattress to see what a mess I was. The radio was playing softly on the other side of the door while I changed into jeans and an old sweater. “Good,” Michael greeted me when I walked into the kitchen. He was at the table with an empty bottle of beer and an open book before him. The table was set with two bowls, big spoons, and a plate of sliced crusty bread. On the stove, the big stock pot breathed out thick vapors. I went to see what was inside and saw claws and shells covered in a red-tinged broth. “What did you make?” “Sit down,” he commanded–not roughly or even insistently, though his voice was firm. I sat down without knowing what it was I was about to eat or even really caring. I wasn’t that hungry and I was beginning to wish I was alone again. But the persuasive aroma from the pot melted my resistance. Michael filled my bowl and his, too, then brought two bottles of beer from the refrigerator and shoved the book he was reading to the far end of the table. He shifted his bowl and utensils opposite from me and as soon as he sat down, we began to eat. The broth was simply the juices from the shellfish, mixed with a little beer, and powered by a healthy pinch of saffron. The vigorous flavor of the spice pierced the shells to permeate, and heighten, the delicate sweet flesh with a sharp bracing smack. While we ate, Michael began to talk more freely. He told me about how he went to Alaska thinking it would be different and how the men on the boats considered him a fool. He spoke a little about the writing he was trying to do, wondering if it was better to return to school or go back on the road again. I listened to him with a deeper interest than I had to any man for a long time, yet there was a part of me that could not give up breaking through the shells and sucking at every last trace of meat I could find. When all the lobster and clams were gone, we tore the bread into the broth and let it swell with the juices, then slurped them up as hungrily as the shellfish. We finished our beers and he got up to get us more. My fingers were florid and sticky, a sharp sting lingered on my lips, but there was a banking warmth in my belly. My head was clear, my fever dispersed. Michael placed the new beers on the table and knelt down beside me, his arms resting along my thighs to clasp his hands on the back rungs of my chair. There was the flavor of saffron on his lips, on his tongue, when he kissed me. I smelled it on his fingers and in the weave of his sweater when I pressed my face against his chest. I was in love with another man yet so much heat had invaded that room. It is nothing more than this, I contended, as I let him go on a little bit further: It is the saffron and the beer, the lobster and the clams, on a snowy wintry night in a northern city with ice floes in the harbor just beyond the frosty windows behind us. And then, like Smilax, I abruptly turned away from him–the worst and only thing I could have done–and when he left I would not see him again for years, when we were both older and different and without a trace of saffron. |
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Michael's Seafood Cure I've tried to come up with an approximation of the soup I was first served in that northern seaside town. I married the man I had fallen in love with and whom I turned away Michael for. When I served it to my husband one night when we were alone he too was overwhelmed by its biting heat. A large pinch of saffron—about sixty threads 1 bottle of a good yeasty beer 2 garlic cloves, crushed and minced 1 tablespoon olive oil 2 pounds of mixed shellfish, such as a small lobster or crayfish, shrimp, clams, mussels, scallops, etc., coarse salt and pepper to taste. Pour the beer into a bowl and add the saffron. Let it steep a good half hour or more. In a stock pot, over medium heat, saute the garlic in the oil until it begins to turn brown. Remove the pot from the heat and layer in the shellfish in this manner: add clams and mussels on bottom, then the lobster and finally the shrimp and scallops. Pour the beer over the shellfish (if the liquid doesn't cover at least 3/ To Serve: Send the kids over to your mom's house. Then bring the pot to the table and ladle a nice assortment of fish into deep bowls. Pour some of the broth over all. Have a plate of hearty crusty bread and a couple of cold beers on hand. Make a toast and dive in. Serves 2.  |
